First day with my e1505

Been working on this thing all day, and wanted to make a post before I head to bed while things are still fresh in my mind.

Being unable to play mkv or pretty much anything that wasnt plain divx/mp3 movies, my toshibas slowness finally got to me and I went out and got a dell to replace my old laptop. I mainly wanted a laptop to play my anime/movies and enough horse power to do SOME gaming to kill time if need. My past laptops have been able to do movies, but the integrated chipsets they have all had have made games unplayable on them, even 2d ones like emulated games in mame. So I settled down with a dual core 1505 with the LCD maxed out and the x1300 card. So far all my assumptions on its performance have been correct and the laptop has been working out quite well.

First thing I did when I turned it on was wiped out all the partitions and reinstalled windows. I'm a poweruser so I wasnt gonna have none of that crap. While I have had few problems, the first one rears its ugly head. Dells winxp installation cd is great and has SATA drivers and SP2 streamlined with it, but the drivers cd only has half the drivers for my laptop, and its stupid autodetection program is detecting the wrong chips (said I had a normal sigma chip instead of the HD, flags me for being able to install drivers for multiple revisions of the same chip). If you want to save yourself alot of headache, just install the ethernet driver (wifi drivers are not on the disc) and download them from dells site. ^^

Other then that, I did have to jetison dells x1300 drivers (CP kept crashing) but the omegas I downloaded are working great. I've installed a few games, all my movie software, and even ran 3dmark 2003. I know the x1300 is fairly weaker then the 1400, but it was a whole lot better then intels 950 (And frankly I will never deal with another intigrated video again, not only are they useless in 3d, but often they have 2d performance issues as well, I figured I couldnt lose if I atleast whent with the x1300) and my conclusion of benchmarks put it around the power of my old 9600xt, wich ran alot of my fav games like unreal 2004. Sure enough, both unreal 2004 and even Guild Wars (wich actually isnt all that graphicly intensive, atleast not in the dx9 department) are running smooth at 1280x800.

Just wanted to comment on problems others are having, for instance the wsxga screen. I am pretty happy with it (I also have dells 20 inch widescreen monitor on my main comp). It is pretty avg though, if not above average. There is that noticable light leak at the bottem, but considering there is none on the other sides of the screen, its actually got my 2005w beat. The dark "lines" on the side are not lines at all, its the same backlight issue almost every other laptop out there has. Unlike full size LCD monitors, laptops are trying to keep their lids thin and their power consumption low, so I am never surprised if a laptop isnt able to keep light distribution totaly even. Oh and thanking my lucky stars, no dead pixles. Btw, I have been nothing but impressed with how well the ati interpolates its pixles when enlarging lower resolutions. Admitedly unreal and guild wars dosnt look sharp as native resolution does, it looks like a good CRT and plenty of detail in the 1280x800 resolutions, and I get to keep the widescreen perspective too.

Noise conserns, the dvd drive is no louder then my toshiba, but it does seem to hate unbalanced disc more, maybe its spinning faster then my toshiba? HD is quiet as a mouse (bios list performance and quiet modes for the HD, but my laptop came with it disabled so I left it alone). The cpu fan is pretty loud on high, but the good news is it hasnt needed to kick into high speed yet, even in games and such. The only reason I know what high sounds like is because I used a program to switch it on for a moment. Its pretty much running on low speed all the time and that speed is very quiet.

So far, if I had any pet pieves about it, theres several issues with the keyboard. The biggest is the placement of the page up and down buttons as well as the delete button. On my toshiba, the page buttons were aligned on the right edge, now they are at the most top right corner. I actually like to switch to them when reading web pages, and this causes me to need to stretch farther to reach them. Also the delete button is hidden in the top right corner, so now I need to relearn quickly deleting files and ctrl-alt-del. Also, and I am not sure why, but I keep hitting the caps lock key. Some other issues I have, volume buttons are tied into windows volume panel, this means volume dosnt work during bootup and within some programs (3dmark 2003 prevented it from working). No lid sensor, so the lcd stays lit when the lid is down, who droped the ball on that one? that was manidtory on laptops back in the 90s.

 

wow awesome review. Im planning to get an E1505. So if I get it, and want a clean install, will the cds it come with have all the drivers...or do I need to go finding them?

 

The cd that dell gives you comes with all that crap.. You will need to call dell and ask for a real windows xp disk.

 

you can either opt for a restore cd (wich may actually be more then 1 cd) wich contains all the "crap" (its nothing more then a one step restore image), or a kind of true windows xp install cd with no non-MS stuff on it. I say kinda true because its dell labled and it wont work on other computers, only dell laptops.

 

ic.. so they supply you with the restore cd. But to get a windows true xp install cd, does one need to buy it from them?

thanks! and if i use the windows true xp install, is it hard to find all the drivers for the different parts?

 

Just specify it at the time of your order; it’s an option. They’ll charge you $10 for the XP disk.

It could be pretty time consuming. There’s another thread here concerning that.

 

I had no problems really in queing up and downloading the needed drivers using dells download area after I told it what model laptop I had. Unlike the cd, the site wont list drivers you dont need.

 

My E1505's screen turns off when I close the lid, perhaps your model has a defective screen sensor

 

lilred, yea I discovered earlier today that there is a sensor, probably in the hinge. Its just not bios controled, ie you need proper drivers installed and windows handels the deactivating of the display. My previouse laptops deactivated the display reguardless of whats currently running. I think the bios controled one was better (you can see window redraw when waking up the display here) but you take what you can get I guess.

 

make sure all ur video card drivers are correct it happens sometimes if your video driver dont load properly