A new contender

[trinityvixen]

After playing around with laptops all weekend, I've finally returned to peruse the Dell store, see what they've got for me and there might be something to it. I've found one latop that looks promising, the E1505, which has the intel dual core processor. I just wish I could play with the laptop like I've done with the MacBook and the Vaio.

The E1505 is about 1.42" according Dell's website, which isn't too bad, thickness-wise. The specs I upgraded it to ran it about $400 more than the most expensive base (the usual upgrades: 1.83 GHz processor, truelife bright screen, 120 GB hard drive--though I'm debating the extra $144 to make it 7200 rpms but only 100 GB), and it comes in at under $2000 with 4 year warranty. The fourth year coverage is especially attractive to me, as that seems to be the breaking year.

I also found a small Dell for my Dad who was eyeing the tiny Vaio at the store, and I think his office gets a Dell discount, too, so I'll recommend that one.

Once again, any thoughts on this computer?

(and my apologies to jlc: I wasn't confusing you with someone else earlier, I was just thinking of someone else and wrote that while responding to you; have I mentioned that I've been awake since 1:30 am this morning?)

Comments

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

Which battery to get depends on how much you'll be using it away from an outlet, I guess. The larger batteries are also physically LARGER, usually hanging off the machine's butt. I can't really recommend one over the other (getting one of each would be ideal, but is also the most expensive, of course) because it depends entirely on how you use it. If you think you'll need more than 3 hours away from an outlet, get the bigger one.

I expect the X1300 128MB chip will be good enough, since you don't do high-end gaming. The X1400 is a pretty incremental increase, and going to 256MB isn't a big deal.

It looks like this machine's standard res is 1280x800 and hi-res is 1680x1050. 1680x1050 on a 15.4" screen means TINY pixels. That means two things: everything will be sharper, and everything will be smaller. The sharpness will really only come into play for viewing/manipulating large images, and for gaming. There aren't a lot of videos around with such a high resolution, and you may end up increasing on-screen text size just to make it readable. What's more, as I said, I don't know how well even the better chips there will drive games at such a high resolution. It's also kind of like having a larger screen, for programs which remain a fixed size, or if you don't find yourself needing to increase text size. If you multitask, you may get more on the screen at once with the higher res (by making each thing smaller). Personally, I'd recommend the lower-resolution, but it is, to a large extent, a matter of preference, and I'm known for using lower resolutions (so stuff is bigger). I use only 1280x960 on my 20" CRT at home....