On laptops

AnandTech recently did a review of a laptop I recently purchased. The Dell Inspiron E1705. I had a 25% off coupon, and was looking for a new laptop anyway. You can read the review here.

One of the quibbles they had was that the keyboard was too small. I have to agree. One of the prime reasons I got the 17" version instead of the 15" version was the mistaken belief that the keyboard would be larger. Oops. This keyboard is the same size as the 15" one, and that will give me problems. My old laptop had a smaller keyboard, and it was on that laptop that I learned I can't type for hours at a time on something that small without side-effects. I can't write a novel on this laptop's keyboard. At least, not in anything resembling 'reasonable' time.

The other thing that tripped me up was the screen-size. Like most laptops these days, this is a wide-screen unit. And a 17" wide-screen somehow looks smaller than a 17" standard. By golly it is shorter, which I've noticed! For what I do with it, I'd have preferred a standard 17". But if Dell could have put in a larger keyboard in that widescreen body, I'd live with the wide-screen ;).

Because I won't be gaming with this rig, I got the embedded graphics solution. This has a considerable effect on battery-life as it turns out. The tests are shown here. I've found that the battery I got with this laptop actually is good for 6 hours. 6 hours! My old laptop was good for about 3.25 hours on a brand new battery. That uptime is just for 'office applications' not DVD playback (old laptop was too elderly to do this...dvd...thing. It didn't even have a CD-burner).

The only personal problem I've had with the unit is that the backspace key falls off. There is a simple fix for this, as the Dell tech said. Perhaps my early keyboarding on an IBM-XT 'clicky' keyboard makes me mash keys w-a-y harder than they need to. Or perhaps it is a design fault. Who knows. But that key keeps falling off, though not in the past week.

Other than the one fault, the unit is solid. I hope to repartition and get a SUSE partition at some point, but I'm not quite there yet. First I need to figure out how to image it. That'll take some time.