Question:
E1505 arrives!
I received my E1505 today. My order was placed March 1st, and received it March 14, so it was a 14 day span from order to delivery. Here are my specs:
E1505, T2400 1.83Ghz Core Duo Processor
15.4 UltraSharp TrueLife Wide-Screen WSXGA+
1GB DDR2 533Mhz (2 Dimm)
Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 950GM
60GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
Intel Pro/wireless 3945 802.11A/G Mini card
8X DVD+/-RW DL drive
This is the first laptop I've ever purchased, and I'm rather pleased. I'm an IT pro (specializing in networking), so I've had a whole lot of laptops for work-from Compaq, IBM, and Dell. I'm not a gamer, so I'm afraid I won't be able to address how the system handles Quake or Unreal. :) My main reason for buying this was to have something mobile around the house mostly for browsing the net and sometimes for some light work over VPN.
My first impressions: Why does Dell load up so much junk on their PC's? I don't need 50 different ISP offers in my face as soon as I boot up the notebook. Oh well, Start, Control Panel, Add\Remove Programs :)
Build Quality: The build is pretty decent. I'm not sure I would try dropping it off of my desk, but I think it shoud handle most falls without much damage. you can press on the back of the screen with a fair amount of force without seeing any image distortion. Screen hinges are nice and secure and prevent it from twisting. I'm not sure I'm in love with the silver case with the white trim. It looks ok, but I'm thinking an all silver case might be a little nicer.
Screen: As I said above, I have the 15.4 TrueLife Widescreen WSXGA+. When I first fired up the notebook there was a lot of glare from the light/windows in the room. As soon as I plugged it into the AC the power settings increased the brightness. If you are going to be using this in a very bright environment, you may want to ditch the TrueLife-or at least consider getting the 9 Cell battery, because believe me, you are going to have to crank up the brightness. On the other hand, I went through the Media Player set up, which runs a video, and I was VERY impressed with the image quality on video material, it rivaled hi-def quality in my opinion.
Right now that's about all I am ready to comment on. Once I get this home I'm going to create an image and back it up to my desktop. I'm probably going to experiment with Windows Vista Beta 5308 at some point, and then finally settle with a clean install of Windows XP Pro. I have a Sony HDR-HC1 HD camcorder that I'd like to try to edit some HD footage with, just to put the notbook through it's paces. I'll add more info as I progress. Feel free to post any questions or requests.
Answer:
Re: E1505 arrives!
Nice intial review. Can't wait to hear more about it.
Answer:
Re: E1505 arrives!
pics!!!!!!
Answer:
Re: E1505 arrives!
I just ordered mine a couple of days ago so I figure I still have a couple of weeks. Right now it is projected to ship on March 28th. Gkurcon, how did the final shipping date of yours compare to the initial shipping date you got?
I will also be very interested in how well it does video capture (you mentioned doing some video editing). Since you said that, and especially since you have an HD camcorder, I was surprised that you went with the 5400 rpm hard drive. I would think you might have a problem with dropped frames (but I hope not). I do quite a bit of video editing on my desktop and ordered the e1505 to be able to do initial video editing on the road so I went ahead and ordered the 100GB 7200 rpm hard drive. If you have no problems with video capture (especially since you apparently will be using a HD camcorder), I might have wasted a little money going with the faster drive. I'd be real interested in any video capture experience you have with the e1505. Have fun.
Answer:
Re: E1505 arrives!
I just ordered mine a couple of days ago so I figure I still have a couple of weeks. Right now it is projected to ship on March 28th. Gkurcon, how did the final shipping date of yours compare to the initial shipping date you got?
In my case [base E1505] ordered last Wed. 3-8, its in transit to UPS or FedEx as we speak. People who have ordered more fully configured units have been waiting longer. Mine had an initial ship date of 3-22.
Hermit
Answer:
Re: E1505 arrives!
I received my E1505 today. My order was placed March 1st, and received it March 14, so it was a 14 day span from order to delivery. Here are my specs:
E1505, T2400 1.83Ghz Core Duo Processor
15.4 UltraSharp TrueLife Wide-Screen WSXGA+
1GB DDR2 533Mhz (2 Dimm)
Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 950GM
60GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
Intel Pro/wireless 3945 802.11A/G Mini card
8X DVD+/-RW DL drive
This is the first laptop I've ever purchased, and I'm rather pleased. I'm an IT pro (specializing in networking), so I've had a whole lot of laptops for work-from Compaq, IBM, and Dell. I'm not a gamer, so I'm afraid I won't be able to address how the system handles Quake or Unreal. :) My main reason for buying this was to have something mobile around the house mostly for browsing the net and sometimes for some light work over VPN.
My first impressions: Why does Dell load up so much junk on their PC's? I don't need 50 different ISP offers in my face as soon as I boot up the notebook. Oh well, Start, Control Panel, Add\Remove Programs :)
Build Quality: The build is pretty decent. I'm not sure I would try dropping it off of my desk, but I think it shoud handle most falls without much damage. you can press on the back of the screen with a fair amount of force without seeing any image distortion. Screen hinges are nice and secure and prevent it from twisting. I'm not sure I'm in love with the silver case with the white trim. It looks ok, but I'm thinking an all silver case might be a little nicer.
Screen: As I said above, I have the 15.4 TrueLife Widescreen WSXGA+. When I first fired up the notebook there was a lot of glare from the light/windows in the room. As soon as I plugged it into the AC the power settings increased the brightness. If you are going to be using this in a very bright environment, you may want to ditch the TrueLife-or at least consider getting the 9 Cell battery, because believe me, you are going to have to crank up the brightness. On the other hand, I went through the Media Player set up, which runs a video, and I was VERY impressed with the image quality on video material, it rivaled hi-def quality in my opinion.
Right now that's about all I am ready to comment on. Once I get this home I'm going to create an image and back it up to my desktop. I'm probably going to experiment with Windows Vista Beta 5308 at some point, and then finally settle with a clean install of Windows XP Pro. I have a Sony HDR-HC1 HD camcorder that I'd like to try to edit some HD footage with, just to put the notbook through it's paces. I'll add more info as I progress. Feel free to post any questions or requests.
I am waiting for mines
Answer:
Re: E1505 arrives!
I just ordered mine a couple of days ago so I figure I still have a couple of weeks. Right now it is projected to ship on March 28th. Gkurcon, how did the final shipping date of yours compare to the initial shipping date you got?
I will also be very interested in how well it does video capture (you mentioned doing some video editing). Since you said that, and especially since you have an HD camcorder, I was surprised that you went with the 5400 rpm hard drive. I would think you might have a problem with dropped frames (but I hope not). I do quite a bit of video editing on my desktop and ordered the e1505 to be able to do initial video editing on the road so I went ahead and ordered the 100GB 7200 rpm hard drive. If you have no problems with video capture (especially since you apparently will be using a HD camcorder), I might have wasted a little money going with the faster drive. I'd be real interested in any video capture experience you have with the e1505. Have fun.
When I initially ordered mine it was due to be delivered between March 21-23 (nearly three weeks!). So they beat that by more than a week.
I'm very new to video editing, and I'm really just fooling around with home videos. Our first child is due next month so that's the main reason I got the camcorder. The laptop was more for casual use than an editing workstation. I knew that if I went with the 5400RPM drive I may be sacrificing performance for real disk intensive apps like editing. Capturing M2T files off of a HD camcorder eats up a huge chunk of disk space as well, so I will keep most of my work on the desktop. I just thought I may as well try to capture some video and see how it turned out. I have a 3Ghz P4 desktop with hyperthreading,150GB 7200RPM ATA 100 HD and 512MB RAM, and trying to edit with it is a little bit cumbersome-real time previews are nearly impossible, I'm not sure if that's due to the amount of RAM, the Radeon 9200 card, or the fact that I am capturing and editing to the system drive rather than a dedicated video drive. I'd love to get a dual core desktop and load it up with 2GB of RAM and a SATA RAID and all of that, but if I did I think I might be headed for divorce court :)
Answer:
Re: E1505 arrives!
Some more thoughts on the laptop:
Well last night I installed Windows Vista Beta build 5308. Man, does it take forever to install! It literally took an hour to install..I'm hoping that they improve that before the final release.
Once the installation was done, I quickly realized that this build definitely has some issues. Here's a few:
Intel 950 Integrated Graphics: not properly detected, max avail resolution was 1280x1024, leading to a very screwed up looking display.
Intel HD audio: not deteced. Bottom line: No sound.
Intel 3945 Pro Wireless: not detected.
Integrated Broadcom NIC: Detected and worked-at least I could browse the web if I was connected via ethernet cable.
I did a search for each of these drivers on the Intel website and found nothing for the Vista Beta releases. I was kind of disappointed because I wanted to see how the 950 handled the new Aero Glass interface. I'm usually a pretty early adopter of the new Microsoft OS's as they're released-right now they have a lot of work ahead of them. I'm still hopeful that they'll have these things addressed by the time the public beta is released. I'm not going to spend much more time playing with Vista, at least until I come across some fixes for the issues listed above.
Media Direct:
This is a pretty neat little feature. It boots up into this mode in about 10 seconds-as opposed to booting into Windows which takes about 30 seconds. It's a nice quick way to access your digital media or watch a DVD.
DVD performance:
I ran a quick test by starting up Media Driect and putting in Star Wars: Episode 1. I'm not sure what the issue was, but I do see some noticeable macroblocking/motion artifacts. Could this be the 950, the screen refresh, or possibly the decoder? Who knows. Not a huge deal for me-I have an HD LCD projector on a 92" screen, so I won't be watching too many movies on a laptop anyhow :) It's just kind of strange to me beacuse the Windows Media Center set up video was crystal clear with no evidence of macroblocking or artifacts. I will have to capture some HD footage from my camcorder and see how it plays back.
That's it for now. Today I'll have to actually work since I spent all day yesterday playing with the new toy.
Answer:
Re: E1505 arrives!
So, are you just messing around with Vista... Or are you actually going to use it as your primary OS? Or are you going to do a split OS with windows XP?
Answer:
Re: E1505 arrives!
I'm just playing around with Vista. Both of the beta builds I've tried (5270 and 5308) have some issues and I wouldn't rely on either of them as a primary OS. I've already re-imaged the notebook back to XP MCE. I might wipe it clean and a do a fresh install of XP Professional this weekend just to reclaim some space from the restore partition, but then again I don't have anything running MCE, so I may just leave it as is for now.
If I was going to do a dual boot at this point, I'd probably go with some kind of Linux distro. I may in fact try that, just to see how much of the hardware is supported under Linux. I'll probably check out some live versions and see how they work first.
Going back to the Vista comments I made. I just did another search and if you follow this link:
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/
they claim that Build 5308 has drivers built in that supports the 945G chipset-but no mention of the 945GM, which I beleive is what is in the E1505?