Dell Latitude D830 User Review

Yeah, it's a 64-bit chipset, isn't it? With not nearly enough pipes to be adequate for gaming. I'm currently using 156.65 - and although they put my WEI at 3.4, there's still not much of a real-world difference.

Oh... and they're STILL unstable. I can't get Dreamscene to run consistently and without crashing. UNTIL now.

 

Freefisheater - great job. Thanks for it. I was considering D830 but after your review I am not sure. On the other hand, many of your problems might be related to Vista - speed, graphic performance etc. Maybe if you had XP, it would have been different?

I will think about HP or ThinkPad then.

I thought I am the only guy to spend ages on forums before buying a laptop.
Can't believe it is so hard to find a right machine....

 

well if no one else has experienced this intrusion attack from that website (xs.to), then i guess i have no case...

macpod, i think you are eligible for free upgrade to norton antivirus 2008 as long as your subscription has not expired. give it a try. you can download a trial and see if your 2006 serial will activate the 2008.
trust me norton is back in the game. not only have they improved security wise, but also visually-the new user interface is not bad and damn! norton just got 80% faster-this includes scan time, boot time, autoprotect. everything is 80% faster. google for the reviews in comparism to 2007/2006 versions.
one more thing, i think you will be needing a firewall and antispyware if you ever load up internet explorer, since you only have the antivirus

 

clicked on the websites and no attack for me. I'm running Avast PRO

 

I'm thinking a lot of my problems may indeed be Vista-related. I'm not yet 100% sure I want to install XP on this system. MAYBE XP will give me the huge boost in performance I've been looking for. But overall, I really think the root cause of most of my problems are the many GPU drivers (Thanks, nVidia!) that haven't worked yet.

If you can check out the T61m or p, do try. I've seen the T61t and I like it very much (except for the supposed battery life and the tiny touchpad). The GPU on the T61p should be a huge boost to it as well. Personally, as I've said, I don't like HP because of the paucity of configuration options (including the tired WXGA resolutions.)

 

And what is the situation with booting now? How is Vista behaving? In the very beginning I though it would be great to have the latest system - why not to enjoy a few bells and whistles... but it hurts the performance, then I pick XP.

 

Yeh. That service pack one better be a miracle worker

 

It's still being prissy with me. I find it incredibly strange that it would ship on a laptop with stock video drivers bad as crap. And that they would allow to ship with a CD/DVD burning software that's INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE SYSTEM THEY'RE SHIPPING IT WITH. Yes, stupid. I got the Roxio DE (Dell Edition, apparently) as part of my package. I also recently got an external DVD-RW drive with Lightscribe. As I was excited to burn some vacation pictures to DVD and burn some nice labels for them as well. When I tried to open up Roxio's Label Express program, it crashed, claiming an incompatibility with Vista. When I removed it to reinstall it, I tried to run the program again and STILL I got an incompatibility error.

I also chose to stick with Vista since I figured... I was going to have to upgrade EVENTUALLY so I might as well get the OS with my laptop. I could always go back to XP in case the incompatibilities and bugs really get to me. But right now, I'm still going to stick it through. Despite all the problems I've been having, it still hasn't gotten to the point where it severely interrupts or hinders my workflow. So in the meantime, I guess I'm willing to put up with it for now.

And to answer your question about bootups, it's not as bad as before. But it still takes anywhere from a minute and a half to three. And loading up to a usable desktop is at least another minute or so.

I can only pray pray pray that nVidia FINALLY release some worthwhile and stable Vista drivers for the card really soon. And that SP1 makes the OS as good and stable as XPSP2 is now.

 

Why stick with just one OS? It's not hard to set up a dual or multi boot system if there is some spare disk space. Having several OS side by side makes for good comparisons between Vista, XP, and even Linux.

 

I agree. With all these problems that Vista is causing, it ain't bad to give Linux a try. Sure, you might not get it up and running as you'd like out of the box (windows media files, mp3, DVD and even your Quadro) but once you do, you'll see the difference right away - everything is much much faster. Super Pi 2M = 1m 10 secs on a 1.66 ghz Core Duo. And if you thought Aero was cool, wait till you try Compiz Fusion.

 

Freefisheater - you are absolutelly right by picking Vista today. I also think that way but I decided that with XP I will have better performance and less problems and this means - more time for doing my job. Maybe in the future I will buy a second laptop for my wife and will play around with Vista.

 

I am seriously considering testing out Linux, but I think I will try it out on either my desktop or on on of my other laptops lying around here. I'm not sure I can make the leap quite yet since I don't have the luxury of time to both experiment with a new OS AND do my work on it at the same time. I need to have full compatibility from all my programs (at least, compatibility with the office and my suppliers) and I don't think starting from scratch on Kubuntu or otherwise will give me that.

But in any case, I did place an order for a few discs. When they arrive, I'll see what I can do.

And with regards to dual (or triple) booting, space isn't quite a luxury in my field - it's a necessity. I need all the local disk space I can get as I work with a lot of media files and project folders. I *do* keep them backed up to an external drive and to optical media, but nothing speeds up a workflow quite like having everything you need immediately at your fingertips. As it is, I have less than 20 gigs left on my 120GB drive.

 

Thanks. I figure, if it's not bad enough to make me want to chuck the system out the window then I can certainly live with it. If it gets to the point where Vista is frustrating me and I can't get my work done... then I'll move back to XPSP2. I'll reinstall it once the reviews of Vista SP1 come out.

 

Freefisheater--great review, probably the best, most comprehensive one I've ever read online. I agree with you on the screen--it's good, but not great (has some "cloud" effect, but it's way better than the one on my somewhat older D620). The build is very study and the case has nearly undetectable flex.

One thing I wanted to comment on was the stability of the Dell nVidia driver. As I don't like how systems come configured from the factory, when I first got my D830, I immediately reloaded it fresh with Vista Business, and reloaded all of the appropriate updated D830 Vista drivers from http://support.dell.com and also updated the BIOS to version A04 (my laptop was shipped with BIOS A02). In the 1 week I've used this D830 (with the update A04 driver), it's been rock stable using the Dell website nVidia driver and have not had a single crash.

Another side note (maybe only important to me), in regards to the reinstallation process of the Vista O/S, I enabled the ACHI feature in the BIOS (as opposed to leaving it in regualr SATA mode), so it woudl make sure that SATA II and NCQ features were turned on to maximize the hard drive capabilities. However, to prevent Vista from crashing during reinstallation, you'll need to download the Dell supplied Intel Matrix Drivers (for ACHI support) and use the utility to put the ACHI drivers onto a USB flash or floppy drive. During Vista installation, at the hard drive section (where it allows you to reformat the hard drive, etc.), make sure you select the option for advanced driver installation, so you can get the ACHI drivers installed. If you enable the ACHI and don't install those drivers, Vista will crash.

 

Hi guys!

This is really the best review I have ever seen, thanks for it!

I have a question to the author and all the others who have/had a macBook Pro.
Is there anything wrong with it?
Actually I cannot make a decision between this Latitude d830, and macbook Pro..osx is much better than vista, but mac has a bit bigger price..Although mac is slimmer, nice looking, and has a very good performance. but ther is a problem with the 1 year long warranty, which needs to be extended, and that costs also some additional money.

I would use it for web development: flash design, programming, adobe cs3 programs, and the usual things..

Please help me to decide (I also hear some bad experiences about macbook, that they broke down a bit too often, they kinda warm up too much, and theres a problem with the quality of the housing as well (abrades)..maybe this was only a problem at the earlier versions. I dunno)

thanks in advance
Andrew

 

I have to correct something: they dont broke down too often, osx is really stable, I meant to say, there are sometimes hardwer issues after a while, and than the service of the mac shop is slow (well it depends on the country where you live, for example I live in Hungary)

 

Looks like Dell finally updated their Vista 32-bit drivers for the nVidia 135M and 140M, which just got released today (no WinXP drivers yet!). It's Dell's second Vista nVidia driver release (A01), and seems based on the nVidia 156.55. Haven't tried benchmarking yet to compare to the original driver (Dell A00, nVidia 101.19)--but thought you guys might be interested in this information. However, I would imagine that their WinXP release should follow soon.

http://support.dell.com

I ended up tweaking my WUXGA LCD monitor settings somewhat, as my default gamma seemed set a bit high at +50 on nVidia's control panel. I turned it down to about 35+ and the skin tones look a bit more truer and less washed out. There is still some light leakage near the bottom corners on my monitor, but it's really not that bothersome (only on truly dark backgrounds, like all black), and is crips and clear for me during overall use--but then again, this D830 easily has a 3x better screen than my old D620 (which had horrible light leakage and had a bad "cloudy" effect of its LCD).

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UPDATE: Installed the A01 Dell nVidia Vista driver on my laptop and I have the following Vista Experience Scores (both using Dell BIOS A04 release):

A1 nVidia Vista Video Driver (v156.55): Aero 3.4, Gaming 4.2; no 3D Mark05 benchmark
A0 nVidia Vista Video Driver (v101.19, original release): Aero 3.2, Gaming 4.3; 3D Mark 05: 2907

 

even a cheap X3100 gets 3.5 for both Aero and Gaming, 140M seems to be quite weak.

 

I highly doubt it. That crappy WEI is to blame for this. In my opinion WEI is useless and crap .