Last week I recieved my brand new laptop, an Dell XPS M1210. The time had come to throw my Dell Inspiron 9100 through the window!
The 9100 has been a great laptop through the last two and a half years but my machine was a monday sample. I was on my third power adapter, one blew up with the smell of gun powder and the second stopped working. I had to switch battery once, when the old one could last for nine minutes. The last 7-8 months I got a BSOD each time I booted it and several times in a row if the laptop was cold, due to some error in the graphics card. I have reinstalled it numerous times and switched hard drive once, since the earlier one started trashing my files. I have not been able to listen to music for a year, since the speaker output only gives my the left channel (oh, I replaced that part once) and when I was using it as a laptop I got burn marks on my thighs. On the positive side I have walked around with a nuclear powerplant - both in power and in weight!
The XSP M1210 is smaller, lighter and faster but lack the great screen of the 9100, but I most often use an external monitor so I don’t care that much about that. Now I can be on the road for 4-5 hours with the third of the weight. The screen is really good and the keyboard works fine. It has a small built-in camera, so Skyping is really smooth. The M1210 is equipped wiht four USB and one Firewire port but it lacks DVI output. It has 2 GB RAM and a Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a 256 MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 graphics card.
I read a lot of reviews before ordering it and I really think that this is the piece of hardware that will fit me! I have not put it through any extensive testing yet, but the performance is really good when developing and running Virtual Server or Virtual PC (I’m trying out 2007 beta now) works really smooth. I don’t hope this one will cause as much headache as the last one :-), but there is one reinstall coming up really soon - Vista!