Living La Vista Loca with my new Dell XPS M1530

Keywords: Journal

So somehow someway, I managed to drain the magic out of my two year old Dell Inspiron 9300 recently. My latest pet project (which incidentally promises to be my most kick-ass project yet) proved to be the last straw for the silver coated development powerhouse which was my Inspiron 9300. It had gotten to the point where I was typing in object names in Visual Studio, hitting the kitchen and frying an omelete before the intellisense kicked in (well, almost). Debugging, building and other typical tasks I ran into while doing development on a day to day basis had slowed down to a crawl and I won't even start to talk about my experiences switching between applications like MSSQL Server, Photoshop etc. which I happen to have to do often. Slow, slow slow.

So I decided to invest in a new development powerhouse. I had been checking out the Dell XPS line of laptops for a hot minute, because quite simply my experiences with Dell customer support wasn't bad while I was using the Inspiron. I remember dropping it once and cracking the LCD screen and having Dell replace it within roughly a week. All these laptops are made up of the same parts anyway, I buy a laptop based on how responsive and forthcoming I think the seller will be with their customer support. So without much ado, let's hop into the specs of the laptop I finally ended up getting shall we:

1. XPS M1530, Intel C2D T7800 (2.6GHz/800MHz FSB, 4M L2 Cache)
2. Crimson Red Casing With Microsatin Finish XPS M1530
3. 4GB, DDR2, 667MHz 2 Dimm, for XPS M1530
4. 15.4 inch Wide Screen WXGA+ TrueLife LCD with 2.0 MO Camera for XPS M1530
5. Camera Software XPS M1530 2.0MP
6. 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
7. 120GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive for XPS M1530
8. Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit Edition English,Inspiron
9. 8X DVD+/-RW Slot Load Drive for XPSM1530
10. Integrated High Definition Audio 2.0
11. 85 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery, for XPS M1530
12. 85 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Additional Battery, for XPS M1530
13. DELL WRLS 5720 EVDO, Verizon Dell Wireless 5720 EVDO Mini Card for Verizon
14. Dell Wirless 355 Bluetooth Module (2.0+EDR)

Those are but a few of my favorite things about this baby -- codenamed Red. I didn't skimp on much in getting this laptop I particularly paid attention to the specs detailed in a posting on Scott Guthrie's blog, about the features to look out for on a development workstation. I maxed out on just about every performance enhancing feature and the result, the best experience I've ever had using any digital device ever. Red has 4GB of RAM compared to my Inspiron's 256MB, quite frankly this is not the PC from the 'I'm a Mac and you're a PC' commercials.' My productivity has gone up by a good 90% and I'm simply loving it. All this goodness came with a hefty price-tag though, weighing in at a little over $3000 after purchasing a two year accidental damage warranty it cost almost twice as much as my college hooptie. I didn't do too much research as far as prices of competing models from HP etc. but I have a feeling Dell's offering might be on the higher end of the spectrum.

So is there anything I don't like about Red so far? Well, not much really, Dell re-arranged a few buttons like the delete, home, page up and page down buttons which is taking getting used to. They are now a single vertical column on the right side of the keyboard and trying to hit one of them usually causes you to hit the other -- not a very good thing when you have text highlighted and you want to hit home, but hit delete instead. I also couldn't install MSSQL Server 2000 because it's not supported on Vista, which means that I have to swith to MSSQL 2005 for all development going forward. Not a bad thing for new projects to come, but what about the handful of sites I have already created that I still have to support occasionally? Migrating them would not be financially practical, so now I'm having to hold on to my Inspiron 9300 to support my legacy deployments. Although, I heard from a friend that you can still connect to older versions of MSSQL from 2005. That would be a good thing.

If you are thinking about getting an XPS then I say go for it. Depending on what you typically use your laptops for, I'd say it's definitely a worthy investment.