Dell Inspiron E1505

I got the second of my two new toys tonight: a Dell Inspiron E1505 with the following:

• Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6 GHz T5200
• 2 GB Dual Channel DDR RAM
• ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 256 MB RAM
• 80 GB SATA 7200 RPM hard drive
• 15.4″ WSXGA+ screen

and…

• Windows Vista

So far I’m pleased with the quality of the computer. Even with the 9 cell battery it’s much lighter than my Toshiba Satellite, I’d say by a good 3 lbs. The only place where it feels flimsy is on top of the laptop when it is closed. The CD/DVD combo drive is silent! In comparison my Toshiba sounds like a 747 using my desk as a runway whenever media is in the drive.

Visually I’m very happy. The maximum screen resolution is 1680×1050 and I love it. I had some reservations about my eyes being able to handle a resolution that high on a 15.4″ screen but so far there are no problems. The increase in resolution from 1280×800 to 1680×1050 is almost as exciting a leap as 640×480 to 1024×768 in 1997. I just did a quick calculation and it seems like I’ve got about 72% more viewable area now than on the Toshiba and it’s a huge, noticable difference. If you have the choice and the $100 take the upgrade to WSXGA+. Aero, the user interface for Windows Vista looks great on this screen powered by the Mobility Radeon X1400. I haven’t got too much into Aero’s functionality but the eye candy does not (yet) distract me from my work (because I haven’t done much on this laptop yet). I’m not sure Aero adds much more functionality than the “3D switch windows” featurette, but like I said I haven’t got too far into it yet.

I installed Java 6 and Eclipse 3.2 tonight and it seemed to go smoothly. I dislike the Windows Vista security “feature” that asks me if I’m sure I want to run this program five times when I tried to run the installer for Java 6 and the My Book Pro II RAID software. Unzipping the Eclipse 3.2 archive went fairly quick, but I don’t have any hard numbers to share with you. Go to Tom’s Hardware if you want stats that badly. Unzipping a large archive like that would have taken at least five minutes on the old laptop but took less than two on the new one. The processors were both at less than 50% utilization for the duration of the unzip.

The keyboard and touch pad/buttons feel nice. The keys have some resistance so you know you’re pressing them. The touch pad buttons are actually real buttons that depress rather than previous generation laptop buttons that barely move when pressed. The touchpad also has horizontal and vertical scroll bars on it to make scrolling easy without having to move your hand back and forth across the touch pad a few times.

After just a few hours of use I’m very happy with my new E1505. I haven’t tried out all of its features yet but so far so good. Hopefully this post illustrates some of the nicer features I’ve found so far.

I plugged in the My Book Pro II I got on Monday and setup was just as easy as it was on the other laptop. Transferring files to and from it was quick and easy, as it shows up just like another hard drive in Windows Vista. To make the deal even better, the E1505 and My Book Pro II are the same color.

Tomorrow I’m going to drop my Toshiba Satellite laptop off to get repaired since it is covered by a new warranty due to a class-action lawsuit. This weekend I’ll spend a little time repurposing the old desktop to be a dedicated database and application server playground.
I’ll get back into writing more software now that I have a working computer again, which means I’ll also be posting more regularly as well.

Thanks for reading. Let me know if sharing my thoughts on the Dell was helpful or useless.