Just got a new 6000, some newbish questions!

With some help, I decided and purchased a dell 6000. The specs were a 80gb hard drive, 1gb of RAM, 1.8ghz processor, DVD-RW and a WXSGA+ screen. Bought for £900 from UK eBay.

1. Is it normal for my 80gb hard drive to be showing it's capacity as 71.4gb?

2. When I researched about the laptop I learnt how it can have a battery life of up to 6 hours. Earlier I got about 2 1/2 hours of battery deleting stuff and installing software. I've got the primary 53 watt/hour which in the eBAy auction it did say up to 6.5 hours. Am I missing something here?

3. I love the clean look of the text and the high resoloution but nearly all the photographs and detailed pictures I see on the internet have a very fuzzy odd look to them, whatever resoultion I set the screen too. Is this normal?

Although I am loving the laptop so far, and I am pleased with my choice, I would appreciate any help.

 

1. The other 8.6gigs is the backup partition that dell puts on all their laptops if you ever have a problem and need to get your system back to factory defaults.

2.My 9300 can't even get through 1 movie before i have to plug it in. Any time you use your cd-drive i.e. when installing software, you suck the battery life alot more. It seems that 6.5hr life you were promised is when it is sitting idle on the lowest brightness setting.

3.I'm guessing you are using IE. It doesn't display hi-res images very well. There is a registry fix for this problem but I recommend you just switch to Firefox and not worry about.

 

Ok, thanks for the info about the hard drive. Also I was just in the process of switching to Firefox which I normally use and the pictures are perfect now! IE is even worse than I thought, thanks very much for the advice there.

I'm still wondering about the battery, as I did read 6 hours in real life situtions. Are you sure there isn't a higher capacity than the 53 watt hour one?
Thanks again for the help. One more thing:

1. Hibernate seems very useful, is there any problem with constantly hibernating rather than shutting down?

2

 

A lot of things cause your battery life slowly to decrease. Using Wireless, high brightness, high usage, and a lot of programs running.

As for your one question, hibernate is ok to leave on, i do it all the time and what i do is stand by. Since its on hibernation, not a lot of proccessors are running. So it is ok, but over all, i would just shut it down.

 

a 53 (6 cell) watt will probably give you about 3 hours. It is the 80 (9 cell) watt that gives you more life which probably could be around 5 to 6 hours depending on wifi, brightness, etc....

On my 9 cell, i get about 5 hours, but I have a monster of a computer that uses at lot of power. My 6 cell would give me 2 1/2 if i was lucky.

No, there isn't a problem using hibernate. In fact, we did a poll/thread about this awhile back, and i believe most of the users said they prefer to go into hibernation instead of shut down.

 

ok thanks all, you have been really helpful. I might buy an extra battery for that battery life, and I am pleased to hear Hibernating is fine.

Thanks again,
Sam

 

do you have clear type enabled?
control panel/display/appearance/effects/
"use the following method to smooth edges of screen font
and check the clear type box

 

The 8 gigs are for windows system restore