My Dell
April 17, 2006
Right before I left for Japan I knew I would need a computer or suffer the paralyzing death of boredom. I got the biggest badass of a Dell laptop I could afford at the time. I ended up with a Dell Inspiron 8200 [1.6 Ghz, 256mb RAM, 40Gb HD, CDR/DVD, NVidia GeForce4 440 Go]. It’s a heavy fucker but I wasn’t going to be toting it around. It was to be my main computer and at the time it had amazing specs, laptop or desktop.
This baby has served me well but it’s fast becoming obsolete. I need a desktop soon. This baby will continue to be my webpage/documents machine though but it won’t run games made past 2002. Well it’s been three and a half years now and I’ve had some less than pleasing experiences with this baby:
Fans
The fans are quite loud and don’t seem to do a great job cooling the innards down. I think overheating was responsible for a couple of shutdowns. The power supply also overheated a couple of times leading to immediate battery use.
Batteries
One of my batteries has died. The other took literally 2 weeks to charge up to 100%. I think it’s working alright now. I’m not sure when the first battery died since I never go anywhere without the power supply. And it was supposed to have up to 8 hours of battery life when both were plugged in. Like hell it did.
CD/DVD drive
The stupid drive seems to heat up a lot and when it heats up it stops spinning. Then on certain disks, like C&C Generals: Zero Hour, it often has lots of trouble reading it. When running Elderscrolls 3: Morrowind, the thing sounds like a Cessna. Plus the thing feels very flimsy - be careful about snapping it.
Touchpad
When I’m typing I sometimes touch the touchpad by accident and send the cursor flying. It feels poorly placed for my hands.
Performance
I’ll blame half of this on Windows XP as much as the hardware but after a few months it slows to a crawl. Booting up takes years longer than on a fresh install.
USB1.1
All my gadgets with USB2.0 are wasted.
Wireless-less
I wish I had the foresight to get a wireless card installed. It would’ve been very useful in Japan. So many cafes and restaurants are ‘connected’ around here.
April 18th, 2006 at 13:05
It’s time to get a new compy! It might be cheaper to get one here and fly it there. You need to be able to play Scorch 3D.
April 20th, 2006 at 13:18
Get a new MacBook. Dual-boot goodness