Dell Latitude Z series

There's a latitude Z600 for AU$1910 on the Australian outlet store right now, seems like a decent deal.

 

Nuts, now I'm debating calling them to add the wireless dock... anybody have it yet and is it worth it, the geek in me wants it and the wirelss charging but not at the combined cost, so out of the two I'd talk the dock... I think....

 

I cancelled my Latitude Z order.

1. Place call to Dell business 800 number, it somehow ends up in India who tells me I dialed the wrong number, I read back to her the number I dialed, she argues with me and tells me that's not the number I dialed. I look at my phone hit redial and sure enough the number I told her I dialed shows up, again, she says I dialed the wrong number but she ewill be glad to rectify the situation and transfer me, WOW.

2. Get transferred to another wrong department who sends me back to India who tell me that I'm at the wrong department, get transferred again. I decide I'll ride this out because I don't feel like going through it all again... get transferred to yet another place in India, she figures out whats going on finally and then...

3. Get someone in the US, woohoo! He understands what I'm requesting!

4. Unfortunately he has no answers, I tell him per their website the wireless 420 card/dock MUST also have the Windows 7 with XP downgrade selected. I tell him I want the wireless dock but no way I want XP on the machine. He has no clue how these machines get configured so he asks his "tech guy".

5. I tell him fine, I'll add the card later, his response, you can't, there are like 36 screws and Dell says no. Great, so in order for me to get wireless dock now I need to pay premium money and DOWNGRADE to Xp?!?!? How the heck does this make sense? This is your premium laptop right? So let me get this straight, Dell is selling this laptop fully configured for well into the $3,000 range and your only option is Windows XP!?!? YUP.

So, I tell him let's cancel the order, Dell clearly doesn't have this laptop ready for prime time. He transfers me again and I get back to India where I have to explain why I'm cancelling... I swear, buying from the Government would be easier, sorry Dell, not worth the hassle to buy from you so I'm looking elsewhere.

 

What a ....

 

I was able to order my Z with XP Professional downgrade from Windows 7 Professional. So it'll ship with XP and when Win 7 supports the docking (and also my internal Verizon card!) I cn upgrade to Win 7.

 

Ouch, congrats but they have no idea when the drivers will even be ready. How they could release a laptop like this sans proper driver support is beyond me.

I can only imagine what my clients would say if I told them I would build them a machine with next level hardware but hey, sorry, you'll have to deal with an OS that was released 8 years ago...

Did the rep at least come up with a date for you for full driver release?

 

Wow, it doesn't even work in Vista...How could they have overlooked that feature?

 

Actually if you just ordered your machine then the driver may be finished by the time you actually receive it. I ordered a Z back in mid October (when they first added Win 7 as an option about a week before its formal launch). Their web site always shows an estimate delivery date 3 weeks out. When that date passed, it got pushed out a week; I called and they promised to expedite my order. Another week passed and instead of being expedited, the order was delayed yet again. Each delay pushes the "estimate" out exactly a week and I now suspect that "estimate" is really just a target with nothing behind it. The current "estimate" is for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving yet it is in build status, so we'll see.

 

This should of at least have some type of dedicated graphics card. For paying that amount of money a dedicated card would be nice i am so sick of crappy intel graphics.

 

That would kill the battery even faster...and for the target market, I dont think a GPU is needed.