Dell is awesome.

The laptop I helped some family members pick out arrived today. And it is great.

Dell Inspiron 8200
Pentium 4 1.6ghz
Ultra Sharp UXGA(AKA "Dell Ultra Sharp")
512mb DDR
GeForce4 GO 440
8x Modular DVD
32x16x48 CDR/RW(I think thats the speeds)
WinXP Pro

The screen on this thing is so sharp, we couldnt believe it. And then I turned on Digital Vibrancy and it "wowed" us all even further.

Havent had a chance to test out the GF4 Go yet, thats for tomorrow

I was just a bit concerned with the heat from it. It was a bit hotter than I was expecting, but it was ok. Im wondering how well the watercooled P4 Laptops I heard about a while back are.

WinXP Pro seems to be good as well, havent really gotten to use it yet. I did have outlook express lockup on me while I was setting up their email but it didnt lose any info.

If you are looking at laptops, checkout Dell. They are awesome.

Does anyone else here have a Dell Laptop? Im thinking about getting one next year now that Ive used one. My p3 1.2ghz laptop is working ok for me now, but it lags in the graphic department.

Don't drop it.

My dog tripped over the power cord, and it was plugged in to the notebook which was on a table.
Broke the sound card.

Yeah, Ive warned them about caring for it. They are older people so no kids are gonna be fooling with it, hopefully.

I kinda scared them a bit about it so they give it more care. Better safe than sorry.

How much did it cost? Can I have one too?




-uh...ok

$3300. They got the cash though, they woulda spent up to $5000 probably.

The Display is probably the most expensive part of the system. When I was checking on prices, the lowest quality display and the highest quality display was a $500 or $600 difference. I had them get a 30gb 7200rpm hard drive too.

I configured a similar PC on several different companies and they came out way more expensive, I see the deal that Dell has with Intel is pretty good. With the other companies I couldnt get a GF4 Go with them either, or the 1337 dell screens.

As expensive as it may seem, I think thats a pretty good price for what they got. I havent been this "wowed" since I played RTCW with my GF4 for the first time.


I cannot get over that Screen though. Im looking at my monitor right now thinking "This Sucks". Im defintely going flat screen on my next PC. Dell would really have something if they could make those screens as Flat Panel Monitors for Desktops.

I think you did a good recommendation on the Dell.

But I must say, kinda' like I mentioned in your intial thread asking about this.

I don't know if that laptop came with anything else like, WiFi or anything but, my pops just got almost the exact same system (except for it being a 1.1GHz PIII and SDRAM) for about $2000 even.

512MB, 40Gig, GF4 440 32MB, nice LCD w/ 1600x1200 native res. Toshiba 5000. And yes, his LCD puts my NEC 19" CRT to shame

Even the PIII he's got in it runs rather hot. If I remember correctly, it averages around 50d C. according to MBM5.
Of-course that's not to surpising when you consider it's a desktop CPU, not a mobile version.

Do not get me wrong, that Dell should do them great.

BTW, Q3A put about 70 - 90 fps @ 1024x768x32 High Detail on that baby.

I was gonna configure a P3 for them, but they probably wont buy another laptop/PC for a long time, so I went with power. It was $200 more for a 1.7ghz CPU, and I didnt think it was worth the money for 100mhz more. Their current desktop is comming up on 3 years old.

I ran 3DMark on it earlier today, scored nearly 5000(It wouldnt let me publish the score for some reason). The "Twister" nVidia tech demo ran so smooth on it. PCMark gave some pretty high scores too, higher than my PC on CPU and Memory. The hard drive wasnt too impressive though. PCMark

I could probably get a lot higher scores on the benchmarks, but I dont know WinXP too well yet so I dont know what background tasks I can and cant turn off.