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The Setup of Two New Dell Laptops |
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 Well, I never thought I'd see the day when we'd have to get some non-Apple laptops but being that Ventrilo and some college software doesn't run to well on VPC on the Mac it was just easier I guess.
So, basically all we needed these ugly things for were Ventrilo, some application for a college and to burn mp3 cd's for a stereo unit (the unit only read 13 songs no matter how many were on it due to the .DS_Store file).
Specs on these little black fugly monsters: Dell Insperion 1000, 2.2GHz Celeron, 512MB RAM, 40GB HD's, XP Home and wireless cards (external of course). So I open the first one up and the card is sitting in the box with the laptop. I get everything unpacked and out and then put in the wireless card and start up the new Dell.
Everything at this point was going good. I put in the computer name which we tried to put in "Clarks Piece of Sh*t", but you can't have spaces in it. So we tried "Clarks_piece_of_sh*t" - oops, it has to be less than 15 characters. Then we tried "Clarks_pos" .. crap, it can't have underscores. OK, "Clarkspos" it is. After that, things went ok. It took like a minute or so to finalize all the settings and actually get me to my desktop.
Another thing that boggled my mind was that when we purchased these things directly from Dell we added in the wireless G card in the store right from Dell. So when I plugged in the wireless card I just expected it to show up being that it's a Dell card on a Dell computer. But nop, I actually had to install the drivers from the CD. How retarded can you be to not even preinstall your OWN drivers on your OWN machines.
I can see the HD light going bananas so I take a gander at the icon tray in the bottom left hand corner. There are about 7 or so of them in there ... loading something. I get about 7 stupid little bubbles that pop up over them saying there are updates and yadda yadda.
The major cause of confusion at one point is they actually put 2, yes 2, security centers on this thing. One from McAfee and one from Microsoft. Both look very similar as well. Only difference I could tell from the MS one to the McAfee one was that the McAfee virus shield had the Windows colors in it for the MS Security Center ... hrmm way to be innovative there. McAfee Security Center popped up first and asked me if I wanted it to be the default one and Microsoft Security Center just sounded bad so I happily agreed to let McAfee be the source of my security.
I then update the McAfee Security Center which goes out to thier Website and grabs updates (it had to restart to install an Active X controller for IE). It updated pretty smoothly and then went off to Windows Update. This thing had SP2 already installed which just came out a couple months ago. So I figured, "Oh there can't be too many updates - this thing just came out". There were 16 ... yep 16 updates for XP SP2 already. I just giggled and installed and restarted. Pretty smooth there too.
Then to make this thing a little speedier I deleted a few programs that were never going to be used (i.e. AOL, Dell Media Experience, Music Match Jukebox and a few other preinstalled garbage programs). I then installed Ventrilo, iTunes, and FireFox.
This whole process took me about an hour. An hour to get a usable computer. You PC people are just way to giving. I want to be able to use my computer as soon as I get it minus a couple updates and maybe a restart. This thing took a total of five restarts. I'm just amazed people by these things. But I guess the $859 price tag is worth the extra gray hair and ulcers for people.
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February 28 2005, 2:17 PM EDT, by
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Comments:
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| DJLC |
2/28/05, 3:51 PM EDT |
Don't forget to post pictures when you get angry at it and chuck it out a window!
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| nhmacusr |
2/28/05, 5:24 PM EDT |
We just got a couple of Dell laptops here as well. I can only say one thing 'cheap'. The old addage you get what you pay for applies here. The thing is a rattle trap. Everytime you put your hands on it to type it sounds like it is going to creak apart. I still haven't gotten the track pad to work right. I bet if I called tech support, they would blame it on he capacitance in my finger! What a POS. I'll stick with my PowerBook thank you very much.
One other thing that gets me is networking. I can never get the roaming profiles to work right under windows. I always have to switch between the wired and wireless ethernet ports manually. What a pain. At least I don't have to reboot like windows 98.
Sorry, but I feel better now.
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| Mg12 |
3/1/05, 7:42 AM EDT |
To be sure, Dell notebooks can be a pain - if the user isn't well-accustomed to Windows XP and PCs in general. As Jonathan said, the preinstalled programs are typically worthless, so delete them and use your own instead.
It can be said that you get what you pay for, but you also get out of a PC what you put into it yourself. PCs require some amount of human processing in addition to their own processing equipment, which is why technophobes can't make heads nor tails of IBM's descendants.
I run the risk of sounding condescending, but I actually do enjoy a challenge that allows me to excercise some creative thought when setting up and running a computer. I spent about four hours tweaking and exploring my new Dell Inspiron 9200 last week (straight off eBay, not Dell.com, claro) and I had a rather good time of it.
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| cAtraXx |
3/3/05, 6:44 AM EDT |
Mg12:
There's a difference between waiting for critical security updates to load and install (and not everybody is lucky enough to have access to a broadband line here.) and setting up your system according to your own wishes. I spend weeks to search for skins, widgets, hacks and so on for MacOS X until i was more or less satisfyed. But all the major updates for the OS don't really bother me, since they're normally rather small and the updater actually does a very good job in distributing software.
Another thing:
A restart on my Mac (G4 800mhz dp, OS X Panther) takes exactly 50 seconds.
A restart on my PC (P4 3200mhz with newer hardware then the mac, w2k) takes about 4 minutes.
On top of that, my Mac is loading all the important services, Web Server, MySQL, several minor services and has a complex skin for the GUI and a hard drive that is nearly full, it starts widgets, it checkes for updates, blah, blah, blah. The PC is a simple game station with high end hardware, without any skin, which only loads it's grafic cards drivers and the virus scanner. Something is very wrong here i think. And i know it's not my configuration, because every PC, no matter how fast it is, seems to run and start up slow on Windows, the one OS that requires you to restart more then any other on the computer market.
While Apple and several others try to make their OS faster, Microsoft is constandly making it slower, so that Intel and AMD can give some reason for their bloated cpu's.
The whole matter is different of course, if you use Linux.
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| Axis |
3/3/05, 1:55 PM EDT |
MMmmm :D
Mg12 does have broadband, if you can afford a high endcomputer why NOT have broadband? I live in a pretty rural area and Its still not hard to get Broadband access. To me, there is no point in having a high end computer w/out a Broadband connect; they go hand in hand!
btw: I've got a P4 2.8GHz with 512 ram and it starts up in 40 seconds :D.
thX thX thX
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| nhmacusr |
3/4/05, 8:06 AM EDT |
re,ember that some of our readers are not in the US. Broadband is a different story in Europe.
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| cAtraXx |
3/4/05, 10:11 PM EDT |
Yes, i actually live in Europe and the costs of broadband are not the problem at all. In fact i could easily afford 2-3 broadband lines, but there's one problem: They are not availible in my area. I never had luck with this ... where ever i move i can be sure of one thing: There'll be no broadband.
Even though technicly they're widely availible, i still prefer to live in more quiet regions.
And Axis, what OS are you using ?
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| Axis |
3/7/05, 2:40 PM EDT |
Windows XP Professional with SP2.
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I scrambled to the top of the precipice where Nick was waiting. "That was fun," I said. "You bet it was," said Nick. "Let's climb higher." "No," I said. "I think we should be heading back now." "We have time," Nick insisted. I said we didn't, and Nick said we did. We argued back and forth like that for about 20 minutes, then finally decided to head back. I didn't say it was an interesting story.
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