Dell laptop owners, what to expect?

[philbob]

Well, I just got it. Ordered it Dec. 1st with an estimated ship date of Dec. 10th. Waited until the 10th for a shipping notice but instead got a new ship date of Dec. 16th!

I told them the night of the 10th to forget it and started looking at other laptops. At 4:00 AM the next morning they sent me a message saying it had shipped, but there was no tracking information provided on the notice. Also no shipping info was on my account the next two days, so I thought they were lying to me to keep the sale.

The estimated delivery date was Dec. 12 but it didn't get here until today.

First impression: Vista is dog slow and it's wireless networking sucks. It took me 30 minutes just to setup my wireless network. I kept assuming this new "awesome" operating system would walk me through the security settings, but it didn't. Not until I dug through the settings and found the manual settings did I have any luck. Lord help anyone who doesn't know networking with this one.

The second networking issue was Vista refused to hook up to my wireless network while the was SSID hidden, even when I checkmarked the setting to explicitly do this. Still a few bugs after more than two years. I may very well “upgrade” to XP.

I checked it out, but now it’s going under the tree until X-mas. Lets see if it is a diamond or a lump of coal

It should be fine from here on out. Unless your a gamer you are fine

 

[Danoz]

Well, I just got it. Ordered it Dec. 1st with an estimated ship date of Dec. 10th. Waited until the 10th for a shipping notice but instead got a new ship date of Dec. 16th!

I told them the night of the 10th to forget it and started looking at other laptops. At 4:00 AM the next morning they sent me a message saying it had shipped, but there was no tracking information provided on the notice. Also no shipping info was on my account the next two days, so I thought they were lying to me to keep the sale.

The estimated delivery date was Dec. 12 but it didn't get here until today.

First impression: Vista is dog slow and it's wireless networking sucks. It took me 30 minutes just to setup my wireless network. I kept assuming this new "awesome" operating system would walk me through the security settings, but it didn't. Not until I dug through the settings and found the manual settings did I have any luck. Lord help anyone who doesn't know networking with this one.

The second networking issue was Vista refused to hook up to my wireless network while the was SSID hidden, even when I checkmarked the setting to explicitly do this. Still a few bugs after more than two years. I may very well “upgrade” to XP.

I checked it out, but now it’s going under the tree until X-mas. Lets see if it is a diamond or a lump of coal

Install Ubuntu 8.10 as a partition. Dell components are generally "Linux-Friendly" because they sell a line of computers with Ubuntu preinstalled. I run Vista Business for things I need Windows for-- but 99% of the time I'm very happy with Ubuntu, and the 3D interface is intuitive and... well, awesome.

 

[Brolan]

It's been a week since it was unwrapped and it is working well so far. It's a big hit with my eight-year old who likes to watch DVDs on it. The Media Center is a big hit with my older boys.

Cold booting Vista still takes a while but the sleep mode recovery by opening the lid only takes a few seconds. So Vista hasn't been erased yet.

One minor annoyance is while playing music there is a one second pause about 30 seconds from the end of a song. I'm trying to figure out what does this.