My experiences with a Dell D620 Laptop. Part 1.

My company has issued me with a brand new Dell Latitude D620 Laptop, so I thought I'd report on the experiences I've had with it. This post is to show Mac Users just what they are missing compared to a 9 month old PowerBook G4/15.4/1.6Mhz and a white MacBook (I got a day to play on).

Specification of the Dell.

Core Duo 1.66 Mhz.
15.2 Inch Screen
1 GB RAM.
Bog Standard Spec.
Windows XP Professional SP1 (why not SP2? I work for a big company so they must know what they are doing and probably spend 10's of millions of dollars supporting this OS each year) + lots of patches+ some company specific installations like Novell Netware.

Appearance/Build:

Outside: The lid and sides are a two tone effect. The lid is plain except for pointless recess on the top while the sides are full of various holes (air vents) and ridges. Underneath is a hideous mess of lumps, labels, grills, more labels, holes, ridges and more labels.

The machine is surprisingly much thicker than my Powerbook G4 considering the screen is much smaller.

Shame there is no built in webcam like the MacBook and no Firewire ports. Instead they have included a Serial port. Do people still use Serial these days? If so, what for? I've never had the need for serial for the last 7 years and then only in the form of ADB.

One nice thing is this machine is dockable. However, the dock prevents you from using the laptop screen along side the main screen since it docks a bit like the old Mac Duos. I understand why for an old Mac Duo, but there's loads of screen estate going to waste in the Dell. Also I've found undocking the Dell does not put it to sleep. On a number of occasions I've opened up the machine only to find the battery is drained or find a very hot laptop in my bag. Before you put the laptop in the bag, you need to open the screen and close it again to make it sleep. Rather naff or is this a case of poor integration with the OS?

Opening up the lid:

- There are even more unnecessary trenches to attract dirt around the keyboard where your hands will rest upon. It has a rather tacky looking two-tone appearance around the keyboard and trackpad with the keys being a different colour to the inner silver 'ring'.

- Why does it still have a nipple to move a mouse? I thought these went out with once the track pad was introduced, having both is just silly. Dell's flat/wide nipple is annoying since you do tend to catch it when typing G, H or B. Also, why is it blue? The use of blue on the keyboard highlights extra key functions on the keys accessible via the Fn key. But the nipple works without pressing the function key first. Making it a silver colour would have been better since it would have been consistent with the other colours of the laptop itself.

- The Machine has 8 large rubber lumps and bumps around the screen, rather ugly.

- The screen itself is of a poor quality quality compared to both a Powerbook and MacBook screens. It is not very bright (even when working inside) and you can see it is not as sharp (even in the standard resolution of the LCD display) as the Mac screens. Pressing the Auto Light sensor, actually makes the screen darker such that it makes it difficult to read! Interesting also the screen has a reduced viewable angle from straight on than the Macs as well.

- There's a bunch of lights on the side of one hinge showing things like Wifi, Disk Access, Power etc. Some flicker showing activity, these are annoying as they tend to catch your eye occasionally distracting you from your work. Besides, who cares about disk access these days with this feature? This is going to happen a lot with modern OS's due to paging. The power button has its own light but goes off once you press it and the power light on the hinge lights up. Inconsistent and unnecessary I think. What would have been useful is a light on this panel which tells me I'm plugged into the mains and recharging!

- Keyboard - The characters on the keys looked like stick on labels and are cheap looking.

- The Caps Lock and Number lock light are not on the keys themselves but appears at the top of the keyboard. What's the point of this? Surely you want this to be on the keys themselves!

- It has a large crude screen latch permanently sticking out and is probably big enough to snag on your clothes if you reach over the screen.

- There are the usual irritating Intel Core Duo and 'Windows Designed for' Labels which catch your hand when resting on the pad. Why couldn't these go underneath with the WIndows XP license label? If you try to remove these you are left with a patch of sticky gloop which is a pain to remove (if you don't have a solvent to hand).

- Track Pad does not support dual finger scrolling but a type of scrolling is available if you go to the extreme right/bottom. I find this crude and sometimes gets in the way of simple track navigation.

- Delete Key is horribly small and squeezed in the middle of a bunch of other keys, given its importance especially in the frequency of a CTRL-ALT-DEL action, I would prefer this to be bigger and on the edge somewhere.

- The up/down arrows duplicate for the Brightness keys situated at the bottom, while the Page Up/Down are placed at the top of the keyboard. This makes their combined use clumsy. Why couldn't the Up/Down keys duplicate as Page keys as well? While Brightness moved to a less useful area of the keyboard.

To some up:

This machine is built from a traditional looking Dell type plastic but feels more rigid than the creaky old D600. Still, its build quality feels worse than the MacBook. The design of the unit is a mess carrying a lot of old PC features, compared to Apple designs it comes across clunky but is no worse than the average PC laptop. I think the design can be summed up very much like the Movie about the iPod packaging if Microsoft got hold of it! So I suppose for many, more flashing lights, keys, ridges, colour tones, ancient features (like the pause key) and mice tracking options, the better the computer is, but I feel this is the same logic of putting your amp scale up to a max 11 instead of 10! :-) Or buying a DVD player because it has more buttons on the remote control.

Speed:

- Although the Dell is supposed to be a fast machine, I find little difference between this and my Powerbook for everyday tasks, which was surprising. Perhaps the better graphics processor makes up for the Powerbook in general windowing tasks to make it feel faster? For instance, if you bring up an application from the task bar on Windows you can sometimes see it redrawing the window, its menus, icons and work area. Whereas on the Mac windows always expand smoothly from the Dock without the obvious redraw at the end.

IE must be a real dog these days for instance:
- Starting IE on the Dell for the first time: Upto 5 seconds then instantaneous there after.
- Starting Safari on the Powerbook: 2-3 seconds then almost instantaneous.
- Opening certain web sites also can take longer. e.g. MacDailyNews 15 secs on IE/Dell where as it takes 3 seconds on the Powerbook. Which is surprising, but is not generally the norm. Also there's very little CPU work going on which makes me think MDN is doing stuff specifically for IE!
(No we cannot use FireFox since the company's website is not compatible with anything except IE!!)

Of course, the Core Duo would shine on CPU intensive applications, but for standard desktop apps it's not that a big thing.

I also wonder if the use of the Dual core in the Dell is not well utilised. Once one application is busy, running another at the same time is still sluggish (like you are only running one CPU). It's like Windows XP gives both resources to the first application. However when you view CPU usage in the Task Manager you can see neither CPU (modules) are getting over stretched. Weird.

To some up: It's always nice to have more speed, but if you've got a decent spec'd laptop 2/3 years ago and only do general business stuff with it and think Windows will still your future OS, I'd wait. After all, your new PC laptop will still be running the same 5 year old OS as before!

(To digress: Strange how some Windows users here think it's good to still be running an OS which has hardly changed for 5 years. I wonder if these are the same people who would argue in the year 2000 that Windows NT 3.5 was still good enough and that the Windows NT OS's released between 1996-2000 were just a waste of money!)

Personally, the MacBook would have been a better choice than the Dell, the better screen and built in Web Cam are enough to pay the little extra than the version of the Dell 620 I got. Overall the MacBook has more features I would look for in a laptop these days and looks and feels great. Unfortunately, it's not a choice since my company is 100% Windows on the desktop and there's people who must think this Dell is cool (or at least good enough!). Compared to another older Dell they might have a point, but they really should get out more and try other computers. ;-)

In the next instalment (if anyone's interested).

More on integration issues with the OS. Powerbook/Mac OS X vs Dell/Windows XP.

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MartinWS

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