mouldy.org

So I got a Dell XPS M1210 to replace an ageing Inspiron 4100. I've had it for about a week now.

Things I liked

• The keyboard feels great. I especially like the Page Up/Page Down placement.
• The screen is absolutely gorgeous.
• Delivery was very fast - I ordered on a Sunday, and had it in my hands on Monday week. Five business days.
• The touchpad is very well placed for thumb-mousing - it's placed and sized very well. I doubt that this is intentional, but it works well for me.
• Performance is great. I very rarely have to wait for anything.
• 3D acceleration is pretty good. Most current games will run adequately.
• Very clean audio. Most laptops have quite a bit of noise - particularly when you use the Ethernet or wireless - but the M1210 is excellent.
• There are USB ports on both sides of the machine.
• The power cable is nice and heavy; it doesn't look like it'll break if it's flexed a lot.
• The case is smooth, well-assembled and doesn't flex excessively.
• The CPU fan is quiet, even at full power.
• Heat from the machine is well-distributed; the Inspiron 4100 used the base as part of the CPU heatsink, which meant it got pretty hot. Nothing on the M1210 gets particularly hot.
• The dual headphone outputs are handy. They can be reconfigured to give surround sound if you're that way inclined.
• The internal speakers sound pretty good. They can be muted independently of the headphone socket, which is nice for a work environment.
• The wireless LAN is fast enough that I haven't plugged in the network cable since initial configuration.

Things that could be improved

• There's an annoying whistling noise when running on the power adapter. It's very high-pitched - right on the edge of my perception. It was very noticeable to begin with, but after a week I'm deaf to it.
• There's no DVI. I desperately want to connect a 24" widescreen LCD to this thing. Why isn't the mini-DVI port on MacBooks and Sony laptops standard? I did consider this before purchasing, but found nothing that I liked that came with DVI.
• There's a lot of wasted space around the screen. It looks like they've sized the machine to be as small as possible while fitting the selected keyboard. The next panel size up probably didn't fit.
• The screen is a bit too small. I wouldn't want to be using it all day - which makes the lack of DVI a bit more annoying.
• The camera is lame in low light - which is pretty much anything indoors.
• Dell's website is a little deceptive; there's an Audigy upgrade which many people believe is for hardware. It's actually a software driver. At least it's only $18 wasted.
• The audio socket placement is really dumb. It's on the front edge of the machine - right in your stomach or leg or workspace.
• There's only one set of buttons on the touchpad.
• The power adapter is pretty heavy - lightweight 65W adapters have been around for years. It is pleasantly cheap, though.
• Like most consumer equipment, the blue LEDs are too bright. They're a bit distracting. You only need a fraction of a milliamp to run them as indicators!
• The battery life is pretty lame. I got the 6-cell battery - performance and weight were my priorities. I've spent maybe half an hour running off batteries, but so far it looks like the battery life will be about 2.5 hours for normal 2D, word processing and development.
• There's no TravelLite module for the DVD drive. It only weighs 200 grams, but I don't need it most of the time. On the Inspiron 4100, it's a handy place to carry cables.
• There's no dock. I can't be bothered unplugging and replugging everything every time I move the machine.
• Somehow, there's no gigabit LAN. For some reason that only comes on Dell's business machines, where I'd least need it.
• There's no legacy ports. This isn't surprising, and I welcome the change - but my GPS still runs on RS232 serial, and I use the parallel port for electronics stuff.
• It won't balance on its edge. I use that all of the time to watch videos while lying in bed! I need to prop it up with something now.
• The media shortcut keys are difficult to use. I prefer the old system where Fn was used to remap existing keyboard keys. There's no way to know which button will do what without looking at them, and that's too slow for me.
• There's no attenuation on the headphone output, so you need to turn the system volume down between the lowest setting and zero (with the keyboard). If you use the Creative drivers, you can't even do that, because they don't let up/down control the volume. iPod earphones are OK, but the supplied earphones are way too sensitive. You just can't turn it down far enough.

Overall, I'm quite pleased.

Update 24 Jan 2007:

• Flipping the wireless switch while you enter the power-on BIOS password causes the password to always be rejected. Is the switch being mapped through as a keystroke?
• Sometimes, turning on wireless during powerup will cause the power management to get confused and turn everything on, while remaining in the 'off' state (the power LED pulses like it's in standby). To get out of this state, I have to power it off completely. I don't like this, because I very rarely reboot; I usually just put the machine in standby to save my session. I do this on desktops, too; hibernation is too slow with > 512MB of RAM. (The you-don't-need-power-management-on-a-desktop crowd can bite me; I have work to do and better things to do than recreate my session every morning).
• There's a bug in either the audio hardware or the drivers; occasionally (every three or four days) starting a new audio stream or opening the volume control will cause the machine to hardlock.
• Battery charging is very slow. I drained the battery to 10% this morning, and it took about six hours to get to 75%. Li-ions are usually very fast for the first 80% (less than two hours) and the last 20% takes a while.
• I missed the free Vista upgrade cutoff by two weeks. Grr.

Update 24 Sep 2007:

I've been running Linux on here full-time for a month or so and am quite pleased. Everything works quite nicely. I had a little trouble getting suspend to work. I'm using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu Feisty . To fix this:

• In /etc/X11/xorg.conf, add the line:

Option "NvAGP" "1"

to the Device section. This will end up looking like:


Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce Go 7400"
Option "NvAGP" "1"
EndSection


• In /etc/default/acpi-support, change

POST_VIDEO=true
to
POST_VIDEO=false

Bluetooth also seems to work (including using a bluetooth headset as an audio device for Skype) but it's a pain - the software seems to be quite immature.

Update 20 Oct 2007:

I just installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on here. There's not a lot that's different - but the CPU is running much cooler. It idles around 56 degrees C and doesn't go through repeated overheat/spin up fans/throttle cycles when it's nominally idle. Is this a side-effect of dynticks?

It still heats up very quickly under load, but like any computer it's normally idle (text editing, web browsing, email, etc).