I bought my self a new Dell machine: Dell Inspiron 15, 3000 series. It has a Celeron N2830 processor, 4GB memory, 500 GB hard drive. My old Inspiron E1505 has been in service since 2007, It was a solid machine but with many issues to report:
1- The battery died quite early, and I never felt like spending over 100 dollars to get a new one that might fail as fast.
2- Less than one year into service, it became excruciatingly slow. I even doubled the RAM to 2GB without any avail. It took Windows VISTA over 10 minutes to start! Eventually, I ended up partitioning my 80GB hard drive and using Ubuntu for the next few years, which was more suitable for the machine performance and my line of work/studies. And from there, it was a steep learning curve on how to install and use skype! update the flash for youtube, and then going back to the older version. And ditching MS Office for open source alternatives such as OfficeLibre.All of these were fine replacements to the first order. However, I never viewed my old Inspiron E 1505 as more than a working machine.
The new machine is smaller in dimensions; the new one is almost one inch shorter. It is also about half an inch thinner than the its older brother. The material seems solid and it is a bit lighter than its counter part. There are few issues with the design:
1- No lights! No Numlk, Wifi, bluetooth, capslk, power on, battery warning, nor that light that flicks like crazy when your machine is busy. These shortcuts might be reasonable for some of there light, but it seems a bit odd and not justified for others. There is no reason to know if your machine is running for instance if the GUI froze for a minute. There is only one light at the front left edge that indicates that the battery is charging.
2- The touch pad lacks the fast scrolling sides. Which were a nice addition to the older machine. Also the physical left and right bottons are a bit hard and noisy compared to the old style.
3- No ethernet port! Simple as that! if you have slow Wifi connection at home or at your office, tough luck, you will be stuck with it unless you will shell off few dollars for a convertor. There is an SD card slot, hidden in a nice place right below the touch pad. and there are only two USB ports on the left. There is an HDMI port on the left also. Also you will have to live without a DVD reader at this machine, which is fair enough since I use one once a year or so, if not less. This is a huge reduction from the E1505 model. Where it had 4 USB ports, ethernet port, 3 types of ports for projectors, and a nice system to read SD cards.
4- The webcam seems to be decent. The fact that it is on the default model shows how times has changed since I bought my first Dell.
All this might fade when comparing the huge advantage in processing power, and storage for the new machine at the pittance of $250 (my old machine cost me around $700 7 years ago) . Not to mention getting rid of Windows Vista. starting up the machine you soon realize that windows 8.1 and this laptop are designed to be a cell phone rather than a laptop. Apps, Windows account that you have to have to run anything (different than your dell account and you are encouraged to use it instead...). The machine runs smoothly, but this is totally a new culture and environment for me. and it feels much more intimidating than what google is doing with it's own line of products.
Installing new software was painless and straight forward, the machine had only the option to try office 365 for free for a short time (No thank you). OfficeLibre impress is slow even on this 64bit machine! And skype is buggy and nothing close to the smooth experience you expect from windows (also you need to sign in and with your windows account and merge the other account with it!).
The 10hr battery seems to be working fine (so far). And all an all, after some big house cleaning of unused apps and apps that belong to your tablet or smartphone, this laptop should be ok. There are few shortcomings that Dell could have delt without, not substantial, but enough to make me think of partitioning this machine and install Ubuntu. At least next time I plan on buying a new machine, I have this blog entry to make me more informed.
