Vostro 1700 + VISTA - THE BAD

You bought a 17" laptop and you're complaining about battery life. Hellooooooo?

 

Dell has a lot of successes or else they would be out of business. When you're a knowledgeable user, going for the bigtime market share giant isn't always going to net you the best reward. Sometimes I buy from Dell, sometimes I don't. I had to return the Inspiron I ordered and finally got something I liked.

You just gotta man up and when something's not right - return it. We're talking about flawed technology in 2007, sometimes it takes more than one try to hit your sweetspot.

 

2500? jeez.

I don't know about you but if I had that much money, I'd get something like a Latitude or something.

 

So the consensus actually is that Dell's 'Consumer' line of computers sucks? I mean, everyone seems to be telling me how I 'should have bought something better' with my money.

The reality is that I'm stuck with it. I can't afford to be fickle when I'm in the middle of a contract, and sending back my main development machine over a couple of dim spots in the display would be stupid right now. I might call in an 'at home' tech from the service contract I paid for to evaluate it when I have a lot less on my plate, but right now I have to just use it the way it is.

 

No, it's fine, as long as you have consumer-level expectations. You seem to rely a lot on your computer for work, you have high quality expectations, and you want to do some fancy things with it. It seems to me that's exactly who a Latitude or ThinkPad is made for. I guess you can fault Dell for passing off a black Inspiron as a "business-class" notebook. But I also still can't see how you got to $2500! Did you spec the fastest possible processor, 4MB RAM and a Blu-Ray drive, or what?

Chris

 

Just FYI You dont need to be without - Dell will usually send you a replacement and then you send the old one back. Just need to copy ****e across when the replacement arrives should that fix your problems.

 

which 17" latitude would you buy?

I don't get it why people would buy latitude, even dell can't explain to me what is really different. Under the hood its pretty much all the same hardware..

 

Actually, I have something pretty similar to what's in joco's sig. Just a 'normal' DVD burner. I spent a little more on the 2 year on-site + accident warranties as well, so I have all the time in the world to address the dim spots.

Like any PC purchased with a 'configurator', it starts off cheap until you actually configure it.

All notebooks are 'consumer grade', unless you want to spend like the Pentagon. I don't personally want to spend $10,000 on something that performs like it was made in 1998 and weighs as much as me.

The Vostro seems stable enough, but it's chock full of annoyances mainly because of this crap M$ shipped out with the attitude of "We'll patch it 'till it works!", and that Dell decided would be good enough for prime time without actually looking past the crappy animations on the desktop, and believing all of the hollow promises of Microsoft like good little lemmings.

Replacing the whole box might fix the shadows in the corners, but it certainly won't fix anything else, and could very well introduce new problems (maybe BIGGER dim spots in the MIDDLE of the screen?). This one's already past the leading slope of the 'bathtub curve', so even getting a fresh, new one, I risk having it go 'klunk' just as soon as I send this one in.

Anyway, I have "It works well" expectations for every machine I've ever purchased, and have been disappointed at some level with almost every one, all the way back to 8-bit days in the 80's, and the biggest thing that torpedoed it this time was Vista. If I paid $3K for the VAIO, I'd still expect it to "work well", and that's also a 'consumer' notebook, and it also has Vista on it, so it's not likely to work any better, other than its 17" WUXGA display would probably be prettier, and it had a built-in TV tuner and 'DVR' emulator for some ungodly stupid reason.