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.

 

Nice intial review. Can't wait to hear more about it.

 

pics!!!!!!

 

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.

 

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

 

I am waiting for mines

 

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

 

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.

 

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?

 

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?

 

Dell is picking up the pace. I ordered a E1505 on 3-8-06, so with delivery on the 17th it will be 9 days.

Hermit

 

try some games and tell us how they run NFSMW and PES5

 

Or better look inside and tell us if a dedicated video card can be installed

 

yeah... and pics please!

 

Battery life? Please let us know (6-cell or 9-cell too).

 

I have the 6 Cell battery. It seems to have a lifespan of a little over three hours during normal use. I'm sure it would be less if watching a DVD. It has some nice power savings features (automatically shuts down the integrated NIC when on battery), and they help.

I'll try to get some pics in the next day or two.

I did open it up and took a look at the 950 integrated graphics. It is field replaceable, but what I'm not sure of is if you can just swap it out with an upgraded card? It's awfully small, so I would think a higher-end card with dedicated memory would take up a lot more space than what's on the board. I want to open it up again and see if there is another slot for discrete graphics. Look here, it seems to suggest that there would be:

http://indigo.intel.com/compare_cpu/showchart.aspx?mmID=22210,145&familyID=7&culture=en-US

I have no idea, like I said this is my first laptop, and I haven't opened one of these up in the last 5 years.

 

Just got my new 6400, the 9-cells battery last around 5 hours. This 6400 is quite fast, although not as fast as my Athlon x2, but I am really happy!

 

I ordered mine with TrueLife Wide-screenWXGA...will the difference be that big if I would chose the Ultra Sharp - if so, how much in real life image/video quality??

 

Ok so I opened it back up and took some pictures. I confirmed that there seems to be no way to upgrade the GPU with the Intel 950 Integrated Graphics-there is just no slot on the board anywhere to add anything. Note the CPU and GPU share the same heatsink assembly. Also pictured are the Intel 3945 Pro Wireless A/B/G card, the T2400 Core DUO processor etc...

 

Here is a shot of the CPU socket, notice to the right of it you see the edge of what I assume is the Intel 950 GPU...it's built into the board, no slots to be found:

 

Nice photos, thank you so much.

Have you deleted the ghost partition and reloaded Windows? Will you be using MediaDirect?

Hermit

 

I did go ahead and installed a clean install of XP Professional. I kept the 40MB partition (Media Direct) and blew away the repair partition (this gave me back about 5GB). After the install I ran Media Direct Repair, burned the ISO to a CD, and booted as per the instructions, and it seems fine, although I've only been able to test a DVD. I don't have anything that runs on any of the support memory card types (my digital cam uses Compact Flash, and HD Camcorder has a Memory Stick Duo).

 

I've done 3 fresh XP MCE installs, I cannot get MediaDirect to work. In all cases I've left the 40MB partition intact. I've deleted the 5GB ghost partition, and with every install deleted C:. The XP install correctly merges all unpartitioned space and puts it into the new C:.

When you boot from the CD, do you get a A: prompt? Have you done a dir command. If so, do you ever see a MD2 partition? I don't.

Any insights would be most appreciated.

BTW, each install results in a prefect XP MCE, just can't get A:cd\MD2 to work, hence can't do a MediaDirect repair.

Hermit

 

When I boot to the Media Direct Repair CD, I get a F: prompt. I can then issue the CD\MD2 command with no problem.

When you press F12 to choose the boot menu, you then choose CD\DVD drive, right?

Once you choose that you should get a prompt that says hit Enter to boot from CD. Once you hit enter then the F: prompt should appear.

Maybe there was an issue when you burned the ISO?

 

Very interesting!!!

When you open Disk Management, is the FAT partition labeled? Mine shows up as a healthy FAT [not FAT32, nor NTFS] partition, 39MB. However it has no letter, certainly not F:. If I right-click on it, either in the table or Disk 0, I'm not able to force a letter.

Clearly somehow this is the key. I will also burn a new ISO as you suggested.

Many thanks,
Hermit

 

It has no letter at all, just a 39MB FAT partition. It's really sounding to me like your original CD wasn't bootable. I usually use Nero Express to burn my CD's. So in this case I started Nero>Chose NewImage/Project, and then From Disc Image/Saved Project. This will create the bootable disc.

 

I just download a new copy of the driver: R113024.exe [please verify the driver number]. Then I opened it, unzipped, and went to the *.iso file, Nero immediately opened, and I burned a new copy of the 2MB bootable CD.

Hit F12, arrowed down to the CD, it booted DR-DOS, and again I was at the A: prompt. When I type in F: [invalid directory] Sigh!!!

Hermit

 

Cool, waiting on a more formal review with pictures though .