It seems that things happen in clusters, sometimes it’s more of a chain reaction. My longtime working laptop lost the ability to backlight the display. Yes, the backlight is replacable with a couple hours tear down and rebuild. Of course, they’re fragile parts and although I’ve replaced them in the past. I’ve got to a point that I didn’t feel it was worth it. The laptop was a ~1Ghz single core PIII or PIV with 2GB of memory. It has had flakey wireless lately, sometimes the machine will wake up and the wireless isn’t working. It’s clone had died with a power switch issue that could have only been solved with a motherboard replacement. So, I switched to an older spare while I ordered a replacement from Dell.
Tag: dell
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Netbook Comparison Listing
If you don’t know what a netbook is, it’s this recent class of laptops that’s very small and portable, many with solid state drives and can be a nice small portable computing platform. These are not desktop replacements, but can certainly be used for some serious work (which puts them a step above a PDA or phone.)
Anyway, this site has a great comparator of the various models currently out from makers such as Acer,Dell, etc. It gives a breakdown of the features, pricing, etc. Very nice if you’re in the market for one of these great small portables.
Many of these ultra small portables run a variant of linux or they will use Windows on them for a windows xp laptop, vista though hasn’t been used on many of these due to it’s resource requirements.
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Dell 17″ laptop advisory… (9400/e1705/m1710/m90 even Inspiron 6400)
Shocking bit of news here…. (sorry, I couldn’t help it.) This is a serious piece though. Apparently the Dell models listed above (Inspiron) and their other 17″ cousins may be affected by a rather peculiar, but serious problem. The screws on the bottom may be putting out 19-65 volts AC (oops.) From the linked article, this issue can be worked around by using the 3-pronged (read-grounded) power adapter that is available for the laptops. (However, Dell has not said anything publicly, it sounds as though the 2 prong adapter may be standard for these.)
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Dell “open source” PC’s for sale
I saw yesterday that Dell has a page advertising computers with NO preinstalled OS. Dimension line… n series and they are targetted towards people that want to install an Open Source operating system like Linux. They do ship with a freedos install disc, but come without formatting/preinstalling anything on the hard drives.
They do note that they don’t support a non-dell installed operating system. (i.e. even if you put XP pro on it well make you prove that it’s a hardware problem.) Still, it’s good to see the option becoming available.
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It’s a story of a Dell Laptop, named the Inspiron 5150 and it’s full of problems
About a week ago, when I was in the midst of several crises, I had a Dell Inspiron 5150 left with me to look at. I had seen it once before to replace the keyboard (I remembered that it had a nice design to allow easy access to swap a keyboard – something that is usually hit or miss with laptop design.) Anyway, this time it was blue screening before it would let you log in to Windows XP. I booted it up and saw the Welcome screen and before my mouse pointer made it to the username I saw the bluescreen.