Got a new M1210, have some questions

Hi All, long time reader, first time poster. 3 weeks ago I pulled the trigger and ordered the XPS M1210 (Vista, 2Ghz dual core, 2gb ram, nvidia 256mb). Received it a week later and I must say I'm impressed. I did have a few questions to ask:

1. Has anyone noticed a difference using a USB 2.0 drive for Vista's ReadyBoost ? Does it noticably speed things up ?

2. Is the 3-in-1 media reader USB 2.0 compliant, so that if I got a 2gb SD card, it could be used by ReadyBoost.

3. I noticed that I've got a high pitched noise coming from the M1210. Do you live with it or request a motherboard upgrade to fix it ? It is kinda annoying.

4. I do have the Toshiba LCD, why is it considered not the best, it seems to look fine to me ? Is there a picture or something to look at to see the weaknesses others are talking about ?

5. Does anyone get that Sonic DLA error message after every boot-up ? Any way to fix it ?

6. I ordered PC-Cillin 14 Security Suite with it. Seems to work fine, any opinions on it ? I'm using it for Antivirus, AntiSpyware, and Firewall.

7. I still have Itunes on my other XP laptop and have been waiting for the new version to come out before installing on the M1210. Should I continue to wait or install 7.0.2 ? Are the problems as bad as what has been reported ?

Thank you in advance for any comments! This is a great forum for information sharing. Joe...

 

Congrats on your machine!

I'm not too keen on Vista, so I hope someone else will be able to help ya here. I'm heading to Linux now haha

3. Where is it coming from? It could be either the fan, CPU or the HD. Do you think you can tell?

4. If it doesn't look broken/bad, no need to worry

5/6/7 Can't help here.

Goodluck!

 

1 and 2 its usb 2.0 and ready boost seems to make some differance not much though
3 its caused by the core2 duo a motherboard has fixed some of the problems others have seen mine doesn't do it
4 if your happy with it don't fix it
5 sonic patch for dla error
http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=vista&message.id=11740
6 IMHO it takes too many resources but it works fine
7 everything ive heard says wait

 

1), 2) Yes

3) Do you have the high-pitched noise while running CPU intensive programs? The MBP had a similar problem

4) If the screen looks greatly, don't worry which manufacture made it.

5) Not sure

6) You could try Zone Alarm 7. I'm using it and it's pretty good. There are a number of free ones too.

7) iTunes is fine right now. Install it now and upgrade it when the new version comes out.


If you haven't, you should really do a clean install to get rid of all the bloatware Dell put on there. It might fix some software issues too.

 

Regarding #3, the sound seems to be coming from the top left side. I did a search on the forum and it seems to have happened to others as well. For anyone that has the issue, do you live with it or go the route of requesting a new motherboard. The weird thing is yesterday I would hear it when the CPU wasn't doing anything, less than 2% utilization.

Thanks for the responses so far, I look forward to more!

 

1) Ready boost can have a profound impact with old slow hard drives, with your machine pretty much the only noticable difference would be slightly lower load times for frequently used programs and quicker recovery from sleep mode, though its odd, on my desktop half the time it takes the normal minute or two to fully wake up, other times its as little as 30 seconds.
4) More people post to complain rather than praise, if your pleased with the screen I would worry about the brand. I actually have a friend who orderd an M1210 because he liked mine, he got it and was completely satisfied with it, I checked it out briefly and was really impressed with the screen, I checked the make and it was a TOSH, I mentioned the negative comments, and the next day he convinced himself that it was a horrible screen,when nothing had changed, he got a new AOU, and it doesnt come close to what he had before.

5) I dislike sonic, power dvd works great for me. I believe its still available for download on dells support site

Congrats on the system, in terms of price, power and potability, nothing else comes close.