My Dell XPS M1330

Well I have ordered (and recieved) a Dell XPS M1330. It is a really nice machine with everything that I need.

The machine I got is based off the cheapest configuration. I kept the slow Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 (1.66GHz) processor since I wont be doing anything too processor intensive (and because I’m on a budget). I went with the 6 cell battery and thre in a Wireless-N card. I also went with 2Gb of memory because we are still mostly using 32bit operating systems and don’t want to run into messy memory problems. Apart from that the system is standard, nothing fancy.

Of course while waiting for the system to get delivered I was doing a bit of searching to see what other people thought of the system, and found a number of problems which arise with this particular system (happens with every system these days). There are a number of possible problems, the most serious being a loud optical drive when you eject or insert media. Nothing too bad.

The first thing I did when I got the machine was to reinstall windows and get rid of those silly recovery partitions, Dell MediaDirect and all that crap. Simply put, the standard Windows Vista install disk accepts my Dell serial number, but the install does not work and Windows will not boot for some reason … you need to use the Dell Windows Vista disk )recovery disk or whatever they call it). Either way this will most likely only be until KDE 4.0 is released when I will probably install Debian or Kubuntu.

So once Windows is up and running I went through it pretty thoroughly to make sure I didnt have any of the obvious problems that other people were facing. Unfortunately I found a relatively rare one … when ejecting media from the optical drive the machine will freeze for about one or two seconds. This is definately at a hardware level because it happens while in BIOS too. So anyways I have called Dell about it and showed them some forum chatter from other people who have experienced the same issue. They are going to send someone out to replace the drive. I seriously hope that works because what do you think they will do next?