Dell D820 New Owner post here :)

Conserning info about the nVidiA 120 and 110 quadro NVS, though scarce, check this link:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_30901.html

If you are going to scimp on the memory, I advise you to think clearly:
If you decide getting 1GB RAM, get the single 1GB ram and not two 512MB..Cause if you going to upgrade you would be sitting with 1GB + 512MB, which is stupid. .. Also, dont scimp on the SDRAM, price difference is just too small..

Happy days people!

 

I just recieved my D820 today. Seems to be a good laptop. One thing bothers me... it keeps strange buzzing sound. Sound comes from front or right side of the laptop but it's not battery that keeps that sound

 

That's strange, mine has been silent so far.

 

I've heard no buzzing from mine. I use it in a quiet room so I would notice it. I hear the fan come on but it is infrequent and quiet (lower pitch and lower volume than my old Inspiron 8000). Left palm rest gets slightly warm. Underside gets very warm after extended use. I always use it on a desk so not worried but if you plan to use it on your lap, it might be too hot. I have 100GB 7200, T2600, Quadro 120, 1680 X 1050, 9-cell battery and 1GB RAM. Screen not very bright (much less than 2007WFP I got with it) but ok for me, since I never use full brightness.

Two problems I've noticed:
1/ when using laptop keyboard, hitting the 'G' or 'H' keys sometimes causes the mouse pointer to go skating up to the top of the screen. Never happened on Inspiron.
2/ Twice after pressing power button, the screen stays black but starts bleeding white light from the top and bottom edges. Bit hard to describe but looks like columns of pixels turning from black to white, starting at the edges. Power off and back on fixes it. Have only seen it while docked on D/port replicator but I've hardly used it un-docked.

Apart from that, very happy with it but only had it a few days so far.

 

so after more than a year... how are your d820 holding up? new d820 owner here

 

It has been great so far. I had jumped through the hoops to get the fingerprint reader setup and used it for logging in, but ended up removing the Wave software after all since the time it took to login would range from a few seconds to 20-30 seconds. This got to be just too annoying. The machine itself has had no problems, outside of a key not working that great (have to hit it several times occasionally for it to register). I still highly recommend this unit.

 

that is good to hear are you running Vista or XP on it?

 

any updates? im starting to experience this whining noise coming from my hard drive too.

 

No problems - got the keyboard replaced by Dell and it's fine now. I was running XP originally, then got a new drive to try out Vista. That only lasted a couple of months, as Vista is just too annoyingly slow at times. Maybe I will revisit it when SP1 comes out. For now I'm back on the original drive with XP and no issues. The drive sometimes makes strange sounds and I think it's hosed, but then it goes away. Now I dual boot Ubuntu and XP.