Guess that makes sense and all, seeing that they are my client and all…specifically the Small to Medium Business unit (SMB).

I came to work on my first day to be greeted by a ridiculously large cardboard box…one that looked like it should be carrying a giant nuclear tower or something like that. It was very ugly and had a huge black Dell logo on the side of it.
This was quite the opposite of of my Macbook Pro purchase.

After plowing through opening the thing, I realized that, buried beneath several other smaller cardboard boxes, was a flatter, more thin cardboard box containing a brand spanking new Dell 630C laptop. After getting it all setup and running, I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with it.

The overall look of it is pretty aesthetically pleasing. Though it’s certainly not anywhere near as sleek and ‘designery’ (I made up another word…awesome) as a Mac, it doesn’t look like a brick of black electronics. It’s black and grey, and the plastic used seems to be of high quality. It’s thin and light, but it doesn’t feel like if you were to drop it, it would shatter or break.

There are two things about the feel of it I noticed right away. First, the hinge on the lid is almost perfect. It adjusts very easily, but it doesn’t make you muscle it to get it to a proper viewing angle. Once you get it in place, it doesn’t move or wobble. And second, the keyboard is fantastic. It feels very solid, tactile & responsive.

Overall operation of it feels fast. I guess it should, seeing that it’s a 2.2 Dual Core Intel chip w/ 4 gigs of RAM. The video card is an nVidia Quadro 135M, which isn’t a slouch when it comes to strictly business-class usage. It operates quietly, the fan kicking on only every once in a while. Otherwise, it runs cool. Using it normally, I can have it sitting on my lap with some shorts on and it doesn’t burn my legs.

The trackpad feels decent. The ‘eraser head’/'mouse nubbin’ is throwaway, but is OK nonetheless. There are 4 USB ports, a 1394 firewire port, an SD slot, 1 PCMCIA slot, DVD-RW/CD-RW, a serial port and a VGA port. The screen is 14.1 inches and looks decent, though just a tiny bit on the dull side. Of course, I’m spoiled by my Macbook Pro; the screen on that thing is pretty much unbeatable in my opinion…

My point isn’t to write an in-depth review or anything like that. Rather, it’s to point out that I think Dell has made some pretty great strides in their product line over the years. I mean, yeah, I’m ’supposed’ to say that, seeing that technically Dell keeps me in a job. But I honestly feel like this is a great improvement over what I used in the past.

I’ve also seen some of the XPS M1330s floating around, and those are pretty nice looking too, though I haven’t used them at all. They have a very sleek look about them…

Anyway, so overall, I’m not disappointed with my nifty new work laptop. Then again, just about anything would be better than the piece of crap Trashiba…whoops…Toshiba…I had previously.

So…if you’re looking at buying a PC, buy a Dell. Not only will you be getting what seems to be a pretty darn good quality machine, you’ll be keeping your ol’ buddy Andrew in a job that much longer, and that’s what we all want, right?

Right.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 6:09 pm and is filed under General, Life, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.