Doug Warner

Yesterday I said I was looking at the D830 or the T61, but I had forgotten about the Dell Latitude D630 that I had looked at a couple times. After talking with Tiff about getting a new laptop and getting the okay, I finally went with the D630.

I think this will be a nice compromise of screen real estate and portability. I really like having the WSXGA+ screen, but the laptop is big. I think the WXGA+ resolution will be workable while on the road and when I'm at my desk I'll typically be hooked up to an external LCD anyway, so the drop in resolution shouldn't be as horrible as I thought it might be.

I guess we'll see if I made the right choice in a couple weeks.

++++Order details * Ordered: 2008.02.04 * Estimated Ship Date: 2008.02.12 * Estimated Delivery Dates: 2008.02.15 - 2008.02.19 * Delivered: 2008.02.11 * Build Price: $1516 * Order Price: $1116 ++++Specs * Latitude D630, Intel Core 2 Duo T7500, 2.20GHz, 800MHz 4M L2 Cache, Dual Core * 14.1 inch Wide Screen WXGA+ LCD * 512MB, DDR2-667 SDRAM * 128MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 135M * 120GB Hard Drive 9.5MM 7200RPM * Touchpad with UPEK fingerprint reader * Dell Wireless 360 Bluetooth Module * 8X DVD+/-RW * Intel 4965 WLAN (802.11a/g/n) mini Card * 6-Cell/56 WHr Primary Battery * 3 yr mail-in service warranty ++++Additional Hardware * 2x 2G RAM ([http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208323 Transcend 2GB 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 667/PC2 5300]) * Dell P-10 AC adaptor * Dell D/Port docking station * Dell D/View laptop stand +++Decision I chose the D630 to get something smaller and lighter than my current HPzt3000CTO. I knew I would be sacrificing screen real estate for that (size and resolution), but through the 4 years I've owned my HP I've wanted something a little more portable, and having an external monitor should make up for the difference. I was originally torn between the Dell Latitude D830 and the Lenovo Thinkpad T61 15.4" as a full replacement for my current laptop. In the end the smaller size and lighter weight for more portability won me over. I couldn't go down to an ultra-portable X61 or M1330 because the screen size was just too unusable as well as the fact that docks weren't as readily available for the smaller Dell models. +++[http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/things/Dell+Latitude+D630/ Photos] [http://www.silfreed.net/photo/gallery/d/30214-2/img_3292.jpg] +++Initial Impressions The laptop seems to be doing great. It's tremendously faster than my previous laptop, and that one wasn't slow. All hardware seemed to work great with F8. Wireless was supported by the iwl4965 driver. I had to install the nvidia proprietary drivers from the Livna repository to get 3d support. I'm not terribly impressed with those drivers as they don't have good support for xrandr to switch my monitor setup dynamically. I have two problems currently: * Random lockups: dmesg/logs seems to indicate this might be related to the iwl4965 driver. * wine doesn't run HalfLife 2: the game crashes when starting to display the menu. ++++Update 2008.03.17 The kernel-2.6.24.3-12.fc8 package seems to have resolved my lockups. The HalfLife 2 game still crashes for me under wine. +++Review coming..

I hate sick days. Especially ones like this; I'm lucid enough to know that I should be being more productive, yet not lucid enough to trust anything I would do. Damn Dayquil(tm).

So this weekend (Friday, actually) I finally managed to get ahold of a Wii (damn those marketing people at Nintendo for making that sound dirty). The Wii Sports game it came with is a lot of fun. My sister and cousin Logan were up for the weekend so I took it along over to my parents' house Friday night and we had a good time bowling. I picked up Super Mario Galaxy on Sunday and it seems like it'll be a nice experience with the Wii's controls, but I'm not sure how strong of a game it really is. I'm looking forward to seeing what games 2008 can produce for the platform.

I got my taxes out of the way, and despite having to pay a small penalty for not paying quarterly estimated taxes for the past half-year, I made out pretty well. Well enough that I can seriously consider replacing my aging HP zt3000. I've upgrading the laptop in the past, but I'm not sure that it's worth the expense giving the performance gains would be minimal. My biggest grips right now are CPU speed and video card age. While I'm not an avid gamer anymore, I still can't play anything semi-recent like Team Fortress 2 that everyone on #cplug seems to rave about.

Front runners right now are the Lenovo Thinkpad T61 15.4" and the Dell Latitude D830. Considering the laptop is my primary desktop now, I need something with dock support so that I don't need to plug in power, video (external LCD), sound (external speakers), and USB devices (iPod, USB phone charger). That's just too many things to plug in all the time.

I would like something more portable than my current zt3000 - and neither the T61 or the D830 fall into that category. The 14.1" T61 is a bit more portable and so is the Dell D630; I guess I need to look at the HP offerings again just to make sure I didn't rule them out earlier. I really like my 1680x1050 WSXGA+ screen resolution, I could probably stand going to 1440x900 since I have a 20.1" 1680x1050 external LCD available for desktop use.

And that's it for my semi-lucid sick day blog (sad that it takes a sick day for me to have a real blog update).