First Impressions: Dell e1705 with Vista Ultimate Preinstalled

Now that I have had the e1705 for a week and a half, I wanted to share some initial impressions.

First, the Dell ordering experience. I ordered the machine by phone, as I wanted to get my employee discount. The sales rep was very nice, and even gave me an additonal coupon discount. The final specs are:

Core2Duo 2.33Ghz
2GB DDR2 RAM (667Mhz)
100GB 7200rpm HDD
GeForce Go 7900 GS
1920x1200 Glossy display

It took Dell about 2 weeks all told to get the laptop to me. It arrived very security (if austerely) packaged in a plain brown box with the blue Dell on it.

All told, I thought this process was nicely handled.


Now to the laptop itself.

First, this thing is BIG! It is very solidly built, no flex in the beyboard, and feels like a rock (almost literally). One could almost think the e1705 could double as a cudgel.

Second, despite my best efforts at getting a clean install it did have the typical Dell bloat image. However, it also came with all the appropriate disks, so I did a wipe and reinstall of Vista. As is typical for Vista installs (because of the new image based install), it went pretty quickly, and about 20 minutes later I had a clean desktop.

Performance wise, this is a FAST laptop (as the hardware specs would indicate). Vista has run flawlessly with no hiccups, as have the other apps I have installed (Office 2007 Pro, Acrobat Reader, QuickVerse 2005, VS 2005). I also have run Madden 2006 and Call to Duty 2 on it, and both of them fly effortlessly.

I also tried playing movies (in this case I used the Battlestar Galactica miniseries and Sum of All Fears as testbeds) both in Windows Media Player 11 and in MediaDirect. Picture wise they were similar, although the picture in Media Direct was a little darker than in WMP. My next ambition is to try them in Media Center.

In addition, I am syncing my Verizon Pocket PC Phone (a 6700) to the laptop, and as I have a data plan (because of my job) I also have set the laptop up to use the Pocket PC Phone as a wireless broadband modem. It gets very good speed that way, better than I expected (however my primary means of connection is still DSL via the draft n wireless).

I will add more as I get more usage time. But so far so good.

 

how much did it cost ?

 

glad you enjoyed it. When my M1210 came, I was sitting by my window watching the truck pull up.

The upsman literally threw it onto the truck's dash, from back in the truck area where the M1210 was at.

I gave him a bad attitude when he came to the door, i bet he still doesn't know what for.

 

Question... how are you connecting the 6700 for modem usage? USB cable or Bluetooth?

And does your data plan only cover internet usage for your phone itself, or are you paying the extra fee to legally tether it? I know you used to be able to tether your phone w/ Verizon without paying extra and they never charged you (as long as the phone itself had data, of course) but was wondering if this was still the case. I have a 6700 too btw.

 

Using Bluetooth. And it is all legal; I have a business level national wireless broadband account with Verizon.

Cost. Good question, I should have included it.

All told, with my employee discount plus the coupon it cost 2167.

 

best laptop for gaming that has for today.. good job... thats why i like dell.. a bit ugly, but pratical..

you mind to post the picture of Vista windows Experience Index? just wanna know how fast a 7200rpm hdd can be, mine is rated only at 4.8 for that, but the graphic jumps up to 5.9

thanks

 

Here it is.

 

I purchased the same exact model and pretty much had the same experience as you did. However, I've had some issues with the nVidia adapter not being compatible with games such as Tiger Woods 2007. I'm hoping that Dell will put out an update for GeForce Go series.

 

How easy was the clean wipe and reinstall of Vista? My Dell laptop is coming on Monday, would like to clear out bloatware easiest way possible. Would you share how you did this? Thanks.

 

I just got my E1705 on Thursday, one week before expected. I agree with all you said, this laptop feels very good and performs very well (even though I just got T7200).
I look forward to cleaning too. When you wiped, did you format/merge with any other partition apart from the one Vista ran on? In my HDD, recovery partition is 10GB, even if files are only less than 4GB, and I don't think this partition is useful at all.
Thank you.

 

Totally maxed out Dell.

As you mentioned above, Dell's keyboard is the most comfortable to type out there.

I wonder how coll it looks with VIsta Ultimate on.

About the Bluetooth + Phone --> internet, my Toshiba P105 has one of those account prepaid unfortunately i format the whole system because of loads of bloat ware that i"m too lazy to delete.

 

The reformat was very easy. All I did was put the DVD in and reboot, then follow the prompts. I did select advanced options so that I could delete the restore partition and the main partition. Then I simply installed Vista into the newly cleared area. No issues.

As to bluetooth phone internet, that was VERY easy to setup. First I paired the laptop and phone, then I setup a new internet connection and specified the bluetooth device as the modem.

 

Thanks Joelist.

 

great review thanx