I forgot - I have military access!

I went to the military shopping site (no taxes!) and managed to customize the following laptop:

Dell XPS 2
17" UXGA Widescreen display with Truelife
P-M 2.0 GHz
Nvidia Geforce 6800 Ultra 256 MB
1 GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
60 GB HD
2x 9 cell battery
Carrying case


Final cost? $1812 after $450 mail in rebate.

 

Made 2 mistakes there.

1. Subtract 1 of the 9 cell batteries and add on a DVD burner.

2. It's a $400 mail in rebate, not $450. The final cost will be $1862, not $1812.

 

When you say 2x battery I assume you are including the one which comes with the machine. I have 2 and you will need both of them if you take it anyplace where you will have to use it all day on the battery without the ability to charge. I have done this a couple of times and you can go for most of the day assuming the wifi is off and you don't bang thr disk alot plus the screen backlight is turned down.

2 isn't enough to compile programs all day though for instance.

I9300 2.0ghz 1.0gb ram 100gb disk 256MB NVIDIA 6800 dvd rw UXGA Bluetooth Intel WiFi Media Center

 

I have taken mine to a couple of Microsoft all day things and I can go from about 9am to say 1 or 2 doing very simple things. Assuming what you said is true why 2 batteries?
Anyway 2 batteries will last most of a day if you are careful. I would not assume you will be able to charge the battery in between classes unless they are far apart it takes significant time to charge. I forget exactly but more than an hour I think.

I9300 2.0ghz 1.0gb ram 100gb disk 256MB NVIDIA 6800 dvd rw UXGA Bluetooth Intel WiFi Media Center

 

What's the site that you ordered your dell from?

 

If I'm gaming, it will be plugged in in my dorm. If I'm out with it, it will most likely be in class, and I won't be gaming. 2 hours battery life is plenty for simple note taking/word processing.

 

Read the 2nd post in this thread. I dropped the 2nd battery and added a DVD burner instead.

 

I believe he said it was www.USA.com.

 

I do not see where he mentioned that url.

 

yea..i don't either...can u plzz post from which military site u ordered ur laptop from??...thanks

 

I dropped one of the batteries and upped the internal wireless card to an Intel a/b/g 54 mbps. And I made a mistake - it comes out to $1887 after a $400 mail in rebate.


I was considering dropping the XPS 2 carrying case and bumping my hard drive up to 80 GB but on this PC (2+ years old), I'm only using 33 GB. I could always pick up an external HD if I get low on room.

I'll post the link once I place my order. 2 weeks ago, the price was $300 less (woulda been $1557 or so) but more people found out about it so they bumped the price.

 

Sorry, I forgot noone jokes on here.

www.USA.com, implying that he got it from the government...nevermind.

 

i went there...but i still can't find where 2 configure the xps 2 on it...???...i think i need sum help here[:I]

 

So....Are you able to tell us the site yet?

 

Hey man go with the 80gb HD - it's much easier/cheaper to go out and buy a backpack/case for your laptop than to add more hd space. You say you could add an external HD, but that is just a hassle - my advice go the 80gb.

I got a 60gb with my inspiron, after my old laptop had 20gb and thought yeah! Heeps of space, never use it all!!! - But remember you now have a multimedia machine and will start to do all sorts of cool things with movies and images. YOU WILL NEED THE SPACE, in fact try to get as big as possible in the HD department.

Now there is another thing here, if you are going to have a big HD, you need it to be fast as well so make sure you upgrade to faster than 5200 (this is the lowest I think - well it's what I have got and it slows things down). In fact all that ram and cpu aren't worth sh-t if you have a slow hard drive!

Good Luck.

 

Actually HD performance probably will affect gaming the least -- the only time HD will be accessed is when you are loading the game. If you dont have enough memory then game will probably be swaping to the HD a lot -- which will hamper your experience, but the best way to alleviate that is not to get a faster HD but get more RAM. [ ]

On the contrary, an external HD is BETTER than a faster, bigger internal drive if you want to do multimedia stuff. Several reasons: First of all, you can get a much larger drive for a lot cheaper. Secondly, performance will be better because your working HD is a different physical drive than your windows system(swap) drive. If you have both your work drive and Windows system drive on the same physical HD, the one hard drive head have to constantly move between swap files and the actual work files -- By keeping the drives physically separate you can really alleviate a big bottleneck. In fact, most PS professionals will tell you to keep swap disks on a physically different drive than your work disk for performance reasons. Lastly, it's portable and secure -- You can simply detach it and take it with you, or store it away.

cheers,

yass

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by Lobos

 

but wit an external drive...is that Hard Drive added 2 the existing 1??..or is it like another drive in the computer wen u go 2 "my computer"??

6/14-Ordered Inspiron 9300 wit:1.86 GHZ Pentium M | 512 MB DDR RAM | 80 GB hard drive | 256 NVidia GeForce Go 6800
6/29: Expected Shipping