First thoughts on e6420

Thanks for the thoughts:

Indeed, since I have the warranty w/Premium Panel Guarantee, they will cover for any dead pixels I find. Also, since it's less than 21 days it's grounds to return the whole unit if I choose I am quite sure that it wasn't there day 1, since I'm very thorough in my inspection lol.

As far as gaming is concerned, it's better than anything I've had before lol, but for anything fancy I'll just use my PS3. Eventually I will get an eGPU for the rare occasion of a PC only game I really want to play. This machine is mainly for writing code, MATLAB, and general college use (though general use for me basically requires Quad core lol).

As for the sound, the odd part is that I've never herd a peep from my SSD before - it's an Intel 320 (120Gb). Mine came with a 7200RPM Western Digital Black (I was impressed) and it was quieter than this it seemed. However, it may well be something to do with the power supply shifting states, since it sounds like a capacitor squeal - indeed, when the monitor flicks on/off it makes the same sound (only much softer) as my dying LCD panel from 4 years ago.

I'm still not entirely 'sold' on the laptop. I really want to like it, but my typing is terrible on it (partly because I'm not used to avoiding a trackpoint) and neither the mouse/trackpoint are particularly good. Indeed, the mouse buttons seem to be rather finicky on whether they register or not (there are places you can fully press the button and it won't register ever).

Some more notes:
The finger print reader is pretty lame - it actually isn't "ready to go" at the startup screen. You have to swipe once so that it gets the message you want to use it, and then again for the actual swipe.

The steel part of the chassis seems to have similar manufacturing faults as the Series 9 did - the edges weren't finished very well, mine has nicks, bumps, etc.

Battery life is very good on the Dell plan... it lasted through my classes and then for about 1.5 hrs in my office (doing MATLAB and the like).

The scrolling is absolutely terrible... is there a third party driver I can use that won't screw up ControlPoint, because this is a miserable experience. If I use the trackpoint it will randomly switch between horizontal and vertical scrolling when I don't want it to, and the touchpad scroll (I turned on scroll area) feels like it's just sending 'Down Arrow' instead of true scrolling (it's super choppy). In fact, scrolling actually lags out Acrobat Pro which is surprising.

The screen is lower quality than I thought - there is noticeable ghosting while smooth scrolling (using an extremal mouse of course).