M1330 Impressions

Right, as promised- I just received my 2nd m1330 (UK) and thought i'd give my thoughts.

Build:

Pretty good, my original one had a loose bit at the top of the screen and did not sit flat on a table.

The new one sits flat, and the screen is fine, but now there is a very slightly bigger gap on the left hinge (not really at all noticeable) and the dreaded visible teeth at the top of the screen seems present (but once again not too bad).

All in all the build of both has been pretty good but the 2nd one is definately better.

Fingerprint Reader:

My first one was perfect, easy to use and barely ever failed a scan. The new one however seems incredibly picky, I hope this is going to only be a initial problem..... will have to play for a bit longer before making any major judgements.

Heat:

The front left palmrest (above the hard drive) and the bottom left corner seem to get fairly warm, nothing uncomfortable but is noticeable. This is only when idling in windows fyi- and the fan is almost constantly on albeit without producing much noise at all. Once again nothing to particularly complain about as it is a compact laptop.

Dvd drive:

Both of mine have had the mas*ita (spl- eurgghh, stupid name anyway) drive, and both have been fairly noisey and pauses the system when you press the eject button. I've heard this does not happen on the other drive dell use..? Hopefully this can be fixed with future firmware.

Cpu / Southbridge whine

Both have had this annoying symptom. Leads me to believe one has to be very lucky to get a quiet machine! It's not exceedingly loud, but is definately noticeable in a silent room. Most of the time (in normal conditions. i.e. with tv on or other background noise) you have to be listening out for it to hear it. To be honest it is a ridiculous problem for a laptop to have (and I haven't heard of it with any other laptop), but I do not believe it should stop anyone buying a m1330. If you are sensitive to noises like this high-pitched buzz then I would probably advise you to wait for a penryn update of the m1330 and hope the problem is fixed. I think I am going to hold out for a bios update to fix it as it's not THAT bad.

I'll update this later, hope this is of help!

 

To update after a days use:

The "cpu-whine" is definately becoming a deal-breaker. In a quiet environment (my office at work), it is clearly noticeable. I have disabled "popup" using rmclock (and tested with "popdown" disabled as well), and while that decreases the volume of the buzzing, it is still evident :-/

This problem- apparently caused by bad design of the motherboard / chipset needs a fix! Does anyone have any proper fixes for it?

I'm awaiting an email back from Dell Uk, but am sure they are just going to say it is normal.

Portability:

The M1330 is definately portable- it was not at all an inconvenience on my commute today but the weight of it is probably reaching the limit of what I would mind (6 cell battery fyi).


Right, back to work!

 

Well, I hope you can fix the problems. Congrats on getting your second one.

 

@pumauk I had my DVD burner replaced by Dell which was shipped out to me last week and came today. The drive I have now is HLDS GSA-S10N and th e original drive I had was the same as yours Panasonic.. While there was no so called fault with the drive only a noisy gearing and the eject freeze I still think its the better drive of the 2. My HLDS GSA-S10N the gearing is much louder the that of the Panasonic drive but plays smoother and at times you can hear the drive rev up (speed up) and quite load but no lack of performance while watching a DVD MOVIE....MOTHERBOARD BIOS IS A07.

 

Thanks BlackRussian.

What is the best fix for this whine? At the moment using Rmclock to disable C4 state seems the most effective. Interestingly, my bluetoot mx1000 mouse makes this whine worse when I scroll the wheel on it :-S This must be linked to the fact the usb hub is known to affect the whine.

Also, my wifi seems to drop the connection evenwhen I am next to my router..... got the wireless N card- any ideas?

Cheers

oh and also, any ideas whether the headphone jacks are usualy prone to a lot of static?? Mine seems particularly bad but from what I understand , this is the norm ??

 

I also have a bit of whine, it seems worse when the M1330 is on a solid surface such as a table, when it's on my lap it's less noticeable. Plus I also get wi-fi drop outs that I never used to get with my previous laptop but I have the ABG card not N! A re-boot always fixes the issue but is quite annoying, I've tried changing the power settings for the card to prevent Windows from putting it to sleep (just i case that was causing it) and I think it has improved but still not 100%. I also get an occasional Hard Disk click that I'm trying to find a fix for. Other than those issues I'm happy with the M1330 and Vista !!!