Originally Posted by Default

I have had a somewhat moderately good experience with Dell, I own the first generation Dell XPS, it's basically a 15.4 UXGA screen with a Radeon 9700 put behind it, 40 GB hard drive and a massive 3GHZ Pentium 4.

Basically its rubbish. The laptops first of all aren't actually made by Dell, but more a set of selected 3rd party companies that supply the parts while Dells secondary company takes care of putting them together. So already its not strictly a Dell your sitting on your lap.

Next is the process and selection of parts, while Dell has gotten better, its hardwae is strangly set in one single time, now that mobile GPU and processor technology has moved on Dell seems to be sitting firmly in the same place. Its still using the old 6800 Ultra nVidia cards and still charges an absolute fortune for its RAM.

I think the most harsh problem about Dell is not really the hardware its self but the software, in my laptop also known as the Inspiron 9300 has very specific set drivers for the 9700, meaning that ATI don't directly support the company with its driver or software support, unlike Alienware or Rock.

This means we are stuck with the same old driver all of the time, meaning newwer games that released will begin to suffer as I played Tribes Vengeance for a while, as soon as I got the update for it the speed was halfed as well as loading tme and so on. Things ot worse as the cooling setup of the laptop wouldn't last more than 3 weeks without getting a tick blanket of dust over the internal radiators (set infront of the fans cold air flow. This meant that all the stuff would oftern run hot enough to cok even an english man's breakfast well enough.

My last problem is simply the keyboard, so far the keys on mine have broken twice, the first time I will admit it had tea on it so it was messed up anyway, but just a week later and another key fell off after it was reapaired by Dell.

My view on their laptops therefore goes litrally so far, just unimpressed considering I could have bought something far more efficent shuld I have searched just a tiny bit longer on the net :/