Oddball Update

Man, I have to say, that Dell notebook shipped out bloody fast. I learned from a guy at the office that the reason is because I ordered it on like the second-to-last day of the month. Dell goes into mega overdrive in the last few days of each month, trying to fill as many orders as possible so they can add the sales to that month’s revenue figures. Well, I guess we benefited. The machine went from “order placed” to “at the door” in exactly nine days—and that’s with supposedly backordered parts.

Anyway, I actually surprised myself by setting up the entire computer, copying over all of my wife’s files and settings and installing almost all of her favorite applications in one evening. I haven’t configured my own account on the notebook yet, but there will be plenty of time for that as I don’t need it right away. My wife, however, wanted to stop using the crappy old Falcon Northwest space heater—I mean, computer—as fast as possible, so I got her notebook ready to go as fast as I could.

And man, is this machine ever a beauty. Yes, it’s pretty heavy, but that’s about the least of your problems when you consider what all it can do. The power on this machine is simply astounding; it performs like a desktop—a fast desktop—and the 15” wide-aspect ratio TFT screen is so clear, crisp and bright, it even puts my new 22” CRT to shame. (Maybe there’s something to this LCD flat panel stuff after all.)

The machine came with the usual plethora of “vendor tryout apps” installed, like AOL 9.0, a 30-day trial of Norton Internet Security, a bunch of media players, tours, etc. I uninstalled several hundred megs’ worth of stuff, and got the bloated system tray down to a scant four icons (yay!). Then we were in business. With boot-up time cut nearly in half by all this trimming of fat, I set about installing my own applications—firewall, Winamp, Office, the usuals. I copied all 10 GB of my wife’s files from her desktop in roughly 15 minutes via the 10/100 Ethernet connection (I had the notebook plugged into my router), tweaked Explorer, got the font size to where we both liked it, and voila—ready for action!

So, suffice it to say, so far I’m eminently pleased with this computer. It even has a pair of the best-sounding speakers I have ever heard in a laptop, but of course when it’s parked on your desk, you’ll want to plug in your desktop speakers instead. The touchpad and its buttons have been recently reworked as they don’t match any of the photos I’ve seen, and the stupid little “eraser head” pointer nub has been removed completely in newer 8600s, which is great because I hate those damn things. There’s built-in USB (only two ports, unfortunately), Firewire, modem, 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11g wireless, a DVD/CD-RW combo drive which is really spiffing (you can’t believe how great movies look on this thing), and the usual PCMCIA slot and monitor jack.

What do I not like about the notebook so far? Yes, I do have complaints, although minor. First of all, when Dell revised the design to remove that thumbstick pointer, they also decided to remove the parallel and serial ports from the back of the machine. This was just stupid. I mean, I wouldn’t have “minded” so much if they’d replaced them with about four new USB ports instead, but they added nothing. How stupid! So now I can’t hook up my wife’s old printer which is parallel-only, nor can I connect this notebook to KITT via my OBD-II scan tool, since it uses a DB9 serial connection to attach to the computer. (Thankfully I still have my old Inspiron 3200 for this.)

My lone other complaint is the keyboard. A lot of people have bitched about the workmanship of the keyboard, claiming it feels cheap, noisy and fragile. The feel is no different from the keyboard on my mom’s Inspiron 4000 (which I admit did have a cheaper feel than my 3200), but I do have one issue: Every time you press the up-arrow key, if you don’t apply even pressure to the dead-center of the key, the key cap snaps off (it’s captive, fortunately) and you have to snap it back down to secure it. I think this can be solved with some Krazy!™ glue, but it’s retarded that I have to glue down a key cap on a brand new machine. But I’d much rather take the 30 seconds to fix it myself than ship the whole damn thing back to Dell at my own expense! Such a minor niggle isn’t worth it. (And indeed, there may be an even better fix, which I plan to inquire about on the Dell forums before I go gluing anything up.)

Worse comes to worst, the entire keyboard is interchangeable, so I could swap it out if something permanently breaks. That’s what’s perhaps the coolest yet most often-overlooked advantage of this computer. You typically think of a laptop as being one big mess of hardware with a “No User Servicable Parts Inside” sticker on it—in other words, it’s not easily upgradeable—but Dell has tried to make this easier. Flip the 8600 over, and the bottom of the machine is covered with panels of varying sizes, all of which can be removed to admit access to the video hardware, the RAM, the networking hardware, you name it. Hopefully this will make repairs and upgrades to the 8600 a few steps closer to a desktop (although all the stuff behind those panels is still mostly proprietary to Dell).

In closing, this is a great notebook, and my wife and I both hope to get many years of service out of it. I’m gonna have to wait a few days to really try some games and install my own stuff, because my wife probably isn’t gonna let go of the machine until she goes back to work on Friday evening…

In a couple weekends my parents will be in town, and then I get to play with my other toy: the new digital camera…

Categorized as Computers