Experience with Dell Latitude D[568]00's?
StefanEßer
se at FreeBSD.org
Mon Dec 1 17:33:00 PST 2003
On 2003-12-01 16:09 -0800, Doug Barton <DougB at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> Just when I thought the laptop issue was resolved, I've got some new
> drama. :) I am moving to a new job, and they use Dell Latitude's there,
> so I need to find out if anyone has experience with either the Latitude
> D500, D600, or D800. I'm particularly interested in ACPI support in
> -current, and things like suspend, resume, etc. I'm also interested in
I have not got suspend/resume to work on my D800 (but perhaps have
just not tried enough). Everything else works just fine (X11, sound,
LAN, ...). The Bluetooth chip is not detected, though.
> the support for the internal wireless and bluetooth modules. It looks to
> me like the Dell TrueMobile 1400 wireless card is atheros based, so that
> should be fine, yes?
Too bad that I could only get the intel Centrino WLAN chip, when I
bought my D800, some 4 months ago. But the TrueMobile 1400 should
definitely work.
> I'm also wondering about carrying around the D800 with the big screen.
> How is the weight on that? I will definitely be traveling with this
> laptop, so portability is an issue, but I'm a pretty big guy. A 7
> pound laptop isn't that much worse than what I have now, and since I'm
> going to be using it on the road a lot I want something I am
> comfortable with.
I choose the D800 over the D600 because of its 1920x1200 display,
which allows viewing two full pages of text side by side ...
But the D800 is surprisingly heavy and I'm not sure, whether the
D600 might have been a better choice, after a all.
A friend just bought a new notebook, and after having tested my
D800, he choose a D600 with a 1400x1050 display instead, because
of its significantly lower weight and price ;-)
If you need either of a firewire port, the Nvidia graphics chip,
the ultra high resolution display, an additional USB port or the
higher capacity battery of the D800 (72Wh vs. 48Wh), then you want
the D800. The D800 runs 4:20h on its 72h battery under WinXP (when
writing a text in Word). With a recent FreeBSD-CURRENT, the ACPI
battery status reported 180 min remaining with a fresh battery.
> Obviously, if you have bad experiences with these particular models, I'd
> like to hear that, but please don't bother with generic "dell sux"
> messages, since I need to go with what they are already using in the
> office.
My experience has been quite good, and service in Europe seems to be
better than what I've heard from the US. My sister's Inspiron 500m
failed to boot after a few weeks (battery didn't charge, system did
not even run on AC, anymore). She called the service number on Monday,
it was fetched on Tuesday, and was returned (repaired) on Thursday of
the same week. That's not too bad for the cheapest of the service levels
(1 year warranty / mail-in) offered by Dell, IMHO ...
Regards, STefan
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