Apparently because I do not prefer OS X, I am "not truly a creative"
. I'm going to file that along with "a true gentlemen prefers a blonde"
as hobgoblins of little minds, Repeated endlessly by people who aren't even sure what the statement means.
I bought a Vostro 1500, so that I'll have something to do work on, that I can take to and from the new job. And so that I can hang out on the bed with the wifest in the evenings, instead of being stuck at the desk in the beer and videogame room.
I'm not running Linux on it, because I need Photoshop, and I didn't buy an apple because it would have been 2-1/2 times as expensive to get something with a decent video card. I'm also not running XP, because I plan on having this laptop longer than 15 months1
Getting Used to Vista
There's nothing I heard in the press releases or OSNews posts about Vista that made me want to upgrade. Having it now, that seems kind of strange. There are lots of improvements to the usability that I hadn't heard about.
- Searching: The new indexing works seamlessly. The MSN/Live search for XP wasn't even close. Press the windows key to invoke, and start typing. It works almost as well as Quicksilver does2 .
- Screenshots: They're in Alt+Tab, Supra+Tab, and the taskbar, which is awesome. The taskbar especially, I love having a minified version of progress bars and whatnot readily accessible.
- The address bar: It's functional now. The column view in OS X is cool as hell, but it limits how much you can show about the files in a folder. Vista has column view in the address bar, which is way simpler. I love being able to click back up the folder tree:
- Snipping tool: It's a little clumsy for this post, since I'm trying to describe what happens when you hover or click stuff, but it's generally pretty fantastic.
- Windows Calendar, and Contacts: I can't install Outlook Live3 , but it's not as much of a bummer as I thought. Windows Calendar subscribes to my Gmail, basecamp, and last.fm calendars nice and easily. Instead of maintaining a seperate address book, or running a global address book app (a la OS X), Vista uses a contacts folder, just like any other folder. Simple and Beautiful:
There are things I'm not a huge fan of, including TCP Scaling (causes more problems than it solves), and the obvious UAC (which could do with some sensible defaults, so it didn't need to be disabled while setting up the machine.
The Laptop itself
I've not been much of a fan of dell for a long time. Apparently, I can be bought. Even with the screen and video card maxed out, and all the specs4 at least double those of my aging desktop, it barely broke $1K. Nonetheless, I am annoyed by:
- The 10GB recovery partition. They give you the option to partition the hard drive during the order. They just failed to mention the recovery partition and the DirectMedia partition.
- The eject button on the DVD drive. It doesn't seem poorly designed, except that I can't hold that side of the laptop without pushing it. Maybe I'm just uncoordinated.
- End of mainstream support for XP is March 2009 (back ↩)
- you can't make "sentences" the way you can in quicksilver, but that's not the reason quicksilver is indispensable (back ↩)
- I can't seem to buy an update anymore, either, the product home page goes 404. (back ↩)
- except the hard drive. I didn't really need all that terrible early 90's hair metal anyway. (back ↩)
9 Comments
I am still undecided whether to buy a XPS 1530 or a Mac Book Pro. I had planned on getting one this December after the XPS 1530 came out. but Dell is not providing a led screen plus the resolution on the 1530 is too low. I decided to wait till Jan end and see.
yeah, the Vostros and Latitudes are much more flexible in terms of screen resolution (mine’s WSXGA+). It sounds like the LED’s only go up to XGA? I’d honestly never heard of an LED screen.
Vista is still buggy of course, but beautiful. The calendar does subscribe to my Wrike, and I don;t have to use FireFox, the new Explorer works just fine. It’s nice that the new Outlook is perfectly integrated with Wrike http://www.wrike.com/. I get my projects done even faster.
I’m looking forward to SP1 being less buggy (it seems to always take a service pack or two to iron things out). IE7 is a giant leap forward, but it’s still not great (less prone to layout bugs, but still prone to them. ActiveX is mostly corralled, but still dangerous). My one complaint with either Calendar or Basecamp is that they don’t play nicely.
Buying hardware that supports Linux is an awesome move even if you choose not to run in. That sends the right message to them, though you already knew that
yeah, I would have been tempted to go whole hog, if the ubuntu laptops had the option for some decent horsepower, or if the difference between n-series latitudes and the ones bundled with windows was more than 4 dollars
Wow, only like 4 bones difference! That really surprises me, any idea why that is?
I wonder what it is costing Dell for technical (telephone) support of the Ubuntu models?
That’s a bummer that Ubuntu isn’t an option on the higher end models. Hopefully, that will come with time — would be great for business/corporate penetration.
Thanks for sharing these tidbits.
Aside, I didn’t even notice the default check mark in the “Notify me … via email”. Good old black on dark grey.
Sorry about that, I don’t mean to spam anyone. What browser is that? Most browsers don’t allow any styling of checkboxes. Probably for that exact reason, that it would inherit the background color, but not color the check itself white.
I have no idea why the price difference is so low. Either a) microsoft is way undercharging dell b) microsoft is specifically dropping the licensing cost on models that offer Ubuntu, or c), as you’ve suggested, Ubuntu costs more to support.
Given the finickiness of some features (*cough*TCP Scaling*cough*), I doubt that (C) is the case.
It’s really weird that the Ubuntu Inspirons don’t have the option for discreet graphics cards. It might be that NVIDIA’s linux drivers aren’t up to snuff.
i think reason have to be
b) microsoft is specifically dropping the licensing cost on models that offer Ubuntu,
to rule out competitor which is available free of cost…
but in my views,Ubuntu could be a real headache as most of the traditional software doesnt support ,
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