Precision M2400 Owner's Lounge

marcuslai, thanks for the pics and the info. Seems great so far.
Could you give 3dmark06 a try? That score value of the 370M is one of the missing pieces for me while trying to decide between M2400 and M4400.

 

Vista is the way of the future, so I doubt pestering them will do you any good. You're lucky that they support XP at all...

 

Actually that's not entirely true in this case. XP is still used by most large corporations and institutions, and will be for another 1-2 years at least. Dell has a significant amount of money tied up in large accounts which require long term support for XP, and unlike some companies, are actively trying to continue to support it as long as need be (probably until Windows 7 comes out, or over 75% of their customers switch to Vista). That is why they offer XP as a supported option, and were one of the first to announce their intent to do so despite Microsoft's sales plans.

In the consumer line, you are correct, you're probably out of luck (the XPS machines are a great example, some of them can't run XP well as is). In the business lines, where optiplex and latitude machines (in this case we are talking about a problem which seems to be shared by the latitude) are rolled out with XP by the thousands - Dell will fix the problem if possible - as long as they are made sufficiently aware that it is unsatisfactory.

Of course, how long that takes is another question entirely - complain early, complain often!

 

That is true, but I have to say...

Large corporations will not welcome the E-series for some time. Monitor stands, docking stations, etc. will be unusable and they will have to buy new ones (those things can cost upwards of several hundred dollars). They will also need to create new images and purchase new spare parts to support those users. So maybe by that time, they'll support Vista.

I'm also in that situation. My family has five D-series laptops, so I will have a bunch of batteries, power adapters, optical drives, and secondary batteries that won't be usable if I get an E-series laptop. I will probably get a D630 or M2300 before they get discontinued. I'm liking the D-series more and more...

 

For what it's worth, my institution is planning to make the E series available for departmental purchasing within a month or two, depending on the results of testing. Since they don't stockpile volume parts with Dell as they did with previous vendors, relying more on Dell's support model, it's not as big of a deal to switch series as departments choose to.

So, it will depend on each company, certainly, but I think the likelyhood of adopting a new series of machines which still has support for legacy standards like pcmcia, and software like XP, is significantly higher than the adoption rate of Vista, which has problems with a number of specialty solutions in healthcare and other fields.

 

@marcuslai: Which battery you got (or did i just missed it in your specs?) and what can you tell about battery-life?

S.

 

Mine is in the mail now. WOOHOOO! They're saying the delivery date is the 10th, which I hope is true. I believe either the 9-cell battery, or the dedicated graphics card delayed it this long, as people getting E-series with integrated and 6-cells already have them. Any requests?

 

So - have just Recieved my M2400, it is very nice, but something is a litle odd,
the aero graphics rating seems a litle low

Component Details Subscore Base score
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.53GHz 5.4 3.4
Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB 5.9
Graphics NVIDIA Quadro FX 370M 3.4
Gaming graphics 1785 MB Total available graphics memory 4.8
Primary hard disk 163GB Free (184GB Total) 5.4

all the other scores seem ok - and i have updated to the latest drivers....

what you all think ?

 

Sounds about right to me. Remember that the Vista score means nothing in real performance. You're better off trying some benchmarking or even playing some games to see how well it runs. Mine is suppose to be here this week, so we can compare notes.

 

Let me run some tests, i know it is a litle subjective but it does feel a litle slow and the refresh for windows and minimizing and maximizing panes does not feel as slick as it is on other vista laptops i have uses.