D630 Owners Thread

Hey Guys,

I was wondering what drivers you guys are using from laptopvideo2go. I have XP pro with the Nvidia 135M card and was wondering which drivers are the best for the card. Also a pretty dumb question, I was wondering if I have to delete the old drivers after I install the new ones or they automatically are not used any longer.


Thanks in advance.

 

I think you should delete an old driver before installing a new one.

 

I have a new D630. It's a great machine, but it heats up quickly and the fan runs a lot.

The computer heats up in about 30 min and then the fan will start cycling off and on every few minutes. The fan will turn on for 3 min and off for 4 min before starting again. So, in a one hour time span the fan is on about 25-30 mins. The bottom gets just hot enough that you probably don't want it on your lap. This is when just surfing the web-minimal cpu usage.

Does anyone else experience this or is this something I should talk to Dell about?

Btw, I have a T9300 penryn chip, the Nvidia graphics card, and a 120gb 7200rpm drive. I shut off indexing in Vista.

 

Now some more observations on the D630.

First, the cons. I had a T61 which sets a pretty high standard of comparison:

1) Compared to the T61 this runs much hotter. As I pointed out in my last post the D630 I have runs its fan every four minutes or so. The T61 fan ran much less and the bottom was much cooler to the touch. The fan noise on the D630 is not very loud though unless you work in a very quiet environment like mine. Then you wish it ran less often.

2) I use my laptop in a very quiet room and in the still of night the hard drive noise on the D630 becomes annoying. You can always hear it spinning which in fact sounds similar to fan noise- a gentle whoosh sound. The hard drive is mounted under the left front palmrest and if you're in a quiet environment you can easily mistake it for the fan itself. In a typical office or room with background noise you would have to put your ear to the palmrest to hear it. The palmrest stays cool enough.

3) The trackpoint on the D630 wanders occasionaly and does not have as good control as the T61's. The trackpoint buttons are not as precise and the middle button is missing of course.

Now the pros:

1) The laptop is very well buit. No flex. Compared to the T61 I'd say they're equally well built. The T61 I used did have some flex in the palmrests where this has none.

2) It's fast and has no bloatware installed.

3) The screen(wxga in this case) is good. Bright enough with crisp text and decent contrast. In fact, I didn't even have to adjust anything in the control panel. Most importantly to me both the vertical and horizantal viewing angles are excellent. I returned the T61 because it had terrible vertical viewing angles-ie, you had to stare at the screen straight on or the image would be distorted.

Conclusion:

If the D630 I have ran cooler and quieter I would say it's perfect. For my own purposes of sensitivity to noise and heat, and being a trackpoint purist, I'd have to recommend the T61. I know a lot of D630 users says they have quiet systems. And, not every T61 has such a poor screen as the one I received. Some D630 posts here complain about poor screens as well. I guess I got lucky with the screen I got this time around. Put this screen on the T61 and you have my perfect laptop! But, seriously, for now I'm looking into the fan issue to see if this is normal.

 

i have a quick question
i'm going to order this laptop probably tomorrow and the day after, and i was wondering, if i didn't order the fingerprint scanner, would the touchpad buttons be bigger?

 

Yes, a bit bigger.

With fingerprint reader:


Without:

 

ahh that looks nice
btw, are there any coupons out right now? i'm planning on ordering today

 

You can forget about coupons on business laptops from dell
Very Very rare.

Although you might be able to get free next business day shipping like I did

 

Questions for any D630 owners, especially those with the nVidia chip:

I am considering whether to get the WXGA or the WXGA+ resolution on a future purchase. The price difference is not an issue for me. I am leaning towards the WXGA+ for finer pixels, which would be great for multitasking. I currently have a 12.1" running XGA, but I would appreciate more screen space than I have now. I understand that the 14.1" WXGA has almost identical DPI compared to my current display.

If I want to run games on a D630 (nothing much more demanding than Half-Life 2), would this resolution be too large to run natively? In other words, will I pay a performance price for having more pixels? Other games that I would play would be Sim City 4, Civilization 3/4 and Spore when it comes out, and I'm wondering if the larger res would be more of a hindrance (performance-wise) than helpful (in terms of screen area and image quality).

Even for those who do no gaming, I am interested in opinions on WXGA vs. WXGA+. I know it's a personal decision, but I'm asking for your experience with it.

My other question is specifically for those with the nVidia Quadro 135M: does the hardware/driver software allow you to force pillar boxing (i.e. make the display run in 4:3 with aspect ratio undistorted)? I would like to have this option for anything that does not support widescreen format.

 

Since considering you have a 12" XGA, moving to a 14.1 WXGA wont give you the same DPI. However, if you meant WXGA+ (1440x900) then yes, it will be fairly close. If not mistaken its 123dpi(12.1 WXGA) vs 120dp1(14.1 WXGA+)

WXGA+ resolution will still be too much for most games to play well on native, since the D630's X3100 is more or less hopeless on anything other than Vista aero and office aps.

I still feel that 14.1 WXGA is still a good compromise. 14.1 WXGA+ can be a little tiring for extended usage (since I have a D420 that I use occasionally). Perfect would be a 13.3" with WXGA like the M1330.