My new Dell Inspiron 8200

[Adcadet]

as some of you know, I was looking for a new laptop. The old IBM i1452 just wan't cutting it. The monitor was dim, and the Celeron 366/128 just wasn't keeping up. What pushed me over the edge was always having to email myself files and email messages at work and forgetting half the time what I needed to take with me, needing a machine to run Word and Excel (a must in my lab) and I will shotly need a portable machine to run an Access DB on for my epidemiology master's project. And my eyes have been screeming lately after a few hours of reading text on my CRTs.

After some debate, I decided to go with the Dell Inspiron 8200, and it just came today (it was supposed to ship by tomorrow, so it's pretty early). So far I'm really impressed with the 15" UltraSharp UXGA monitor. It's very bright, and it's very usable from a wide angle. The keyboard feels a little bit flimsy compared to my old IBM, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. I really like the dual pointing devices, which suprizes me. I thought I was a "stick man" only.


Anyways, the specs are:
Dell Inspiron 8200
15" UltraSharp UXGA
P4M 2.0 GHz
256MB PC2100 (single DIMM, planning on adding some Crucial soon)
8X DVD drive (too cheap to get the DVD/CDRW or an extra CDRW)
GeForce 2 Go 32 MB DDR
40 GB 5400 RPM HD
Floppy drive (ya baby!)
WinXP Home
integrated NIC
integrated modem

$2157+$55 shipping

If anybody is looking for a desktop replacement, so far I recommend the Dell 8200

 

[Pradeep]

No dead/stuck pixels? Sounds good. I had one red stuck pixel appear after a couple of days, the beauty of 133dpi is that it looks like a tiny speck of dust, can't be seen unless you look for it.

Track beats stick anyday Actually I took the cover off my pointy stick because it was rubbing on my screen with the lid closed and the laptop in the overhead compartment on a plane.

 

[Adcadet]

No dead/stuck pixels? Sounds good. I had one red stuck pixel appear after a couple of days, the beauty of 133dpi is that it looks like a tiny speck of dust, can't be seen unless you look for it.

Track beats stick anyday Actually I took the cover off my pointy stick because it was rubbing on my screen with the lid closed and the laptop in the overhead compartment on a plane.

No bad pixels that I can see. I'm very happy. With so many pixels I know there must be at least one bad one, but I can't find it.

And I like the stick...and the pad.....I can't decide. But mousing with two hands ROCKS!

 

[CougTek]

IMO, while the Inspiron 8200 isn't bad at all, the current best bang for the buck among latops is the Compaq 1510. Ok, the screen is a SXGA+, but the casing is in magnesium and the finish is overall superior to the one of the Inspiron 8200. Simonstre is in love with his 1510 since he has it, for something like three weeks now.

When Dell will introduce its new Inspiron with magnesium casing, their finish might equal or surpass the one of the Compaq. We'll see. But don't start crying, your laptop is way better than mine (I have none).

I hope that by the beginning of 2003, one company will offer a notebook with an UltraSharp UXGA 15" screen, a Radeon 9000 mobile, a 5400rpm HDD (better yet with 16MB cache - sweet dreams) and a magnesium case below 2500U$. IBM sure will have a laptop with these specifications, but they will sell it for 4000U$ so I'm not interested. My bet would be on Compaq if anyone is to release such a beast.