Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Got the XPS yesterday...
SO far I have mixed feelings...
The thing is a brick. It is really heavy, but I expected that. It looks as heavy as it feels, but I guess that's good. It looks tough and well built. I immediately removed the dorky "quicksnap cover" and the machine looks so much nicer without it. With it on it looked like a prop from that movie "hackers" and without it looks very... well almost classy, elegant.
Boot it up and go through the normal first time setup garbage. Basically I only did this to get the 6mths of Earthlink (for my inlaws).
Blow out the partition and install XP Pro from scratch. No problems. Installed very quickly and without any issues.
Driver time. Installed drivers form Dell cds, except for the Intel chipset drivers which I got off of Intel's Site. Something was wrong. Wireless not working, no access to the buttons on the chassis. Go to Dell's site (using standard ethernet connection) and download updated drivers. It seems that at least 3 of the drivers on the cd I was sent were so outdated that they had no functionalitity on my system.
Now that all the drivers were installed, I sat down in my La-Z-Boy with a rum and coke and started to play.
Page cannot be displayed.
Page cannot be displayed.
What's this? The wireless signal strength is showing as excellent. I have an IP address.
Fire up the old Gateway 1450 and it hooks up fine... Great, bad wireless card and the thing is only 2 hours old.
Call Dell... Got disconnected 2x before finally getting through to the dumbest technician ever, but at least he could speak English. After 30 minutes he agrees that it is a bad card and orders a replacement.
FIne, no wireless for a few days. I can live with that. But I was starting to have second thoughts about where my 2500 dollars went.
Okay, let's load some software. Drop in a dvd... nothing. Okay, that's odd. It was a DVD-r with a bunch of utilities and stuff on it. Not being recognized. Okay, try another. Same thing. Dvd+r time... okay that works. Now don't get me wrong... I know that it is a DVD+rw drive and will only RECORD to a +r/rw disc, but it SHOULD still at least read a -r. EVERY other dvd drive I have in my house, at least 10 (all but one of which are just readers, not recorders) will read the disc. Why is it that the 2x dvd reader in my old gateway 5100 can read these discs, the 4.5 yr old drive in my old desktop, the drive in my gateway 1450, etc... they all read -r, yet a brand new drive, that is a recorder (even if it is only +r) cannot see that there is a disc in the drive? Not very happy. Start checking for firmware. None available. Dell's forums, cdrinfo, club.cdfreaks all lead me to the undderstanding that the hitachi/lg gca-4040n is a horrible drive. Many people are having issues with it. Call Dell back. Explain issue. They offer to send me out a replacement drive, but won't guarantee it will help.
At this point I had to calm down. I was on the verge of returning the thing.
I decided I can live without the ability to read dvd-r, if I have to. The new wireless card SHOULD fix the network issue. Maybe things aren't that bad.
Then I ran some software. 3dmark2k1. Just to see what I would get compared to my AMD XP1800+ based desktop. 50% faster on the laptop... 12,200+. Installed office, photoshop, and some games. I was pretty impressed how smoothly everything was running. Then I found out why I bought this thing. Unreal tournament 2004. 1280/800 (correct aspect for the screen), everything cranked. 10+ player deathmatchs ran flawlessly. Everything looked so beautiful.
I will right some more later, for now I have some gaming to do.
Dell Inspiron XPS
Discussion in 'Dell' started by Donnelltech, May 11, 2004.
