Dell Latitude D510 - First Impressions

So my laptop finally arrived on Friday!

I've been playing around with it a bit this weekend, and while I'll do a full review later (based on Ruari's review of his D800), here are some of my first impressions:

The first thing I noticed was how it is much lighter and thinner than the Inspiron 5150 I was using for work. The power supply is also way smaller and lighter, which makes sense for something that's meant to be portable! (I'll take some photos for the full review).

As soon as I switched it on, I was amazed at how quiet it is. You almost can't tell if it's on or off, based on the sound. Even the CD drive is really quiet.

Unfortunately, the second thing I noticed when I switched it on was how the screen is much brighter at the bottom than at the top. At first it's just a bit annoying, but the longer you use it the worse it gets. The top, especially the corners, are quite dark, while the taskbar looks washed out, which makes it very difficult to set the brightness and contrast levels. It also makes it quite difficult to see highlighted items at the bottom of the screen. In fact, I suspect that it may be a flaw - TFT screens, apparently, shouldn't have this problem, although of course the viewing angle can influence the brightness quite a lot. But no viewing angle decreases the brightness gradient on my screen :-(

It runs very cool - the drive gets a bit warm after a while, but the keyboard area is totally cool.

Another annoying thing is that the touchpad is not centered, but is slightly off to the left. This is disconcerting, because when typing you tend to want to center your hands around the touchpad, which means you keep hitting the wrong keys (assuming you type using both hands, of course :-) Also, the delete key is located on the top two rows of reduced-size keys, rather than being a normal sized key down around the enter key location, which is annoying when typing but critical when trying to ctl-alt-del - you can't do it one-handed any more :-(

The basic feel is very nice - the case is slightly roughened, nice silver look (I just hope it doesn't wear off in high-usage areas). Oddly, the earphone and mic jacks are in the HDD bay, and the cd drive is in a removable module bay. So if you want to install a second battery, which goes in the module bay, you'd need to remove the cd drive. The catch to open the case is a push button, rather than the slider that I'm used to, but that's not really a big issue either way. The HDD bay doesn't sit quite flush with the case, but I plan to take it out and reseat it in the hope that that will fix it.

Maximum screen res is 1024x768, which is fine for normal stuff (internet, e-books, that type of thing) but isn't really good enough for Visual Studio coding, where you need to have lots of stuff on the screen at once (not that I've installed Beta 2 yet, but I plan to get to soon!).

Which brings us to microsoft, meaning XP. I used to really hate the way ms organised the OS - I still do, but mostly I just hate the defaults that they use. The good news is that they can generally be changed, but the bad news is that it's not always clear where to change them! For example, here's a list of things that I want to do but can't quite figure out how (so if you know, please let me know!):

• How do I get rid of "auto updates not enabled" icon and annoying popup on login? (no, I DON'T want to enable auto updates, because I'm on dial-up. I wish they would realise that not everyone in the world has a high-speed internet link!)
• Can I make the start menu recent programs actually show the programs that I've recently used?
• I hate the way that ms auto populates your favourites with ms links. I've deleted them, but can I remove the favourites menu item from the folder view?
• How do I disable autoplay completely on cd and removable drives?
• Don't even get me started on integrated cd burning ...

I did discover that to have no user account picture on start menu, to rather have a drop down menu for restart/shutdown/etc, and to not show the welcome screen, you need to go to user accounts - change way users log on. So that's something.

Dell preinstalled windows for me, which is nice, except that I want to partition my physical drive into two partitions - one for the OS, one for data. And unbelievably, XP doesn't have any tools capable of resizing a partion! About the only tool that I've found that can do this is Partion Magic, which is pretty expensive for a one-off resize operation! Partition Expert also seems to be able to do it, and they have a demo version, but it's about 12 Mb so I can't download it from home. It's annoying, because I don't want to install everything in case I actually do have to reinstall XP just to create that new partition :-( And this is what I don't understand about microsoft - instead of building in things like MediaPlayer, and claiming that they're "integral to the operating system", why not build in actual OS tools like partition resizing? Now that's a real operating system function that is actually integral. I dunno.

I did manage to connect to the net, but it was so incredibly slow that I couldn't even log in to my gmail account. I'm hoping that it was an ISP problem and not a laptop problem, because I wouldn't even know where to start looking to fix that. I've tried it three times - once it disconnected me after about a minute of not really going anywhere, and twice it just sat there, not really going anywhere. It does just enough so that you know it is connected, but that's about it.

Overall, though, I'm pretty happy with it, except for the screen issue.