meh
Wont be giving up my Macbook Pro 13"...
You know where you stand with business-oriented laptops. They're chunky, dull-looking machines with all the pizazz of a rainy afternoon in Chester. Dell's Vostro range has been a case in point: a collection of low-power, low-charisma laptops likely to appeal only to the most frugal of IT department bean counters. Dell Vostro …
I would take a look at the above (or 8471 if you want a DVD drive). Battery life is great, the specs are better and the price is lower. Importantly, it comes with w7 pro - the Dell comes with Home edition which I think excludes it from being classed as a business machine especially when doing comparisons.
They're all saddled with the same windose OS.
It must be really hard for the makers to differentiate themselves with that.
Why dont you do a bacl to back review of same or v.similar laptops with Different OS on board?
Yknow: XP/Vista/Mac/Ubuntu/Fedora, and/or MSoffice/Openoffice?
Then the performance differences could be interesting!
I went to check on the new Vostro 3000 at Dell. Starting at the base model i changed the OS from win32 to win64 at which point I got a warning telling me that, and I quote, "A 64 Bit Operating System requires a Minimm of 6144MB of Memory." (spelling error is theirs). As if this wasn't bad enough they don't offer that amount of memory on the base model. I used dell chat to try and tell them but I couldn't get them to understand
i installed Windows 7 on a Presario in 12 minutes the other day, from boot to desktop, using a USB key. Why the hell would I want to use a DVD drive for this purpose. Seriously, optical drives are old hat.
I might at a push, have a Blu-Ray drive in the living room, but I'd rather download it (legally) and, using the money saved not buying the physical item (???), to buy extra storage for the media server.
Still, the Vostro is eye-candy I suppose, but a single core sucks.
...and I think they're on to a winner; even the dual core version's really well priced for what you get. Have to say, though, I don't think it's going to do their Adamo sales any favours; perhaps they're worried about machines like the Acre Timelines stealing their lunch money more than that, though.
I on the whole like Dell laptops, they do the job well for the price, but this, like the adamo is just horrendous! yes, it is thin, but it looks awkward from every angle no thankyou!
lack of optical drive? meh, id rather have the space devoted to more battery any day of the week...
and how is a machine geared at cloud computing any use if its barely able to stay up for 2 hours! and thats on the review model without 3G clawing away at the battery!
It is interesting that the Vostro V13 is available with Ubuntu pre-installed, so no Windows tax. At least on www.dell.ca.
The pity is, the Ubuntu editions of the V13 are only available with the Celeron and the Solo CPU options (no Core2 option), and nothing can be customized, not even RAM size.