NEW - Official 1720 Owner's Thread

Since the other one got lost somewhere... lets start a new one. Please post any info about your 1720 - include - Ordered date and status of your build. If you have gotten it - PICS!

Ordered mine 7/3
Estimated ship date 7/26
Has been in build stage for the past week

How about the rest of you?

 

ordered: 7/4
in pre-production stage since 7/5
Estimated delivery (or is it ship date) : 7/31

ordered T7300 / 160GB 5400 / 2048 RAM 667 / 8600GT / Ruby Red / truelife 1920.

 

Old one was fixed

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=137749&page=8&highlight=official+1720

 

Chocolate, T7300+4MB, 2GB@667, 160GB@7200, Bluetooth, webcam, ultra glossy screen. It will cost me nearly 2 months of GI Bill benefits, but man is it worth it.

Almost ordered an E1705 - in my cart for a couple days, kind of a cooling-off period. Need a new laptop for school. Old Inspiron 5160 getting loud, slow, and hot. E1705 wasn't everything I wanted - no num pad, and I hate black keyboard.

Decided to go ahead with E1705 purchase on 6/28, but when I hit the Dell web site, there it was... a thing of beauty, wrapped in chocolate. I found I could get everything I wanted (a num pad is very important to me) for about the same price as the E1705 that was lacking.

I jumped on it. Ordered on 6/28 with standard 3-5 day shipping. Dell said they shipped it via DHL on Sunday, 7/8 and DHL delivered on Tuesday, 7/10. That's 12 days from order to delivery - not bad.

The good:
Huge screen - easy to read at 1920x1200.
Bluetooth
Numpad
Light colored keys you can see, even when you get old.
Extensive bios settings
5 USB ports
wi-fi catcher
Chocolate (or if you prefer, pink, blue, green, black, silver, etc)

The bad:
A little heavier than I hoped - 8 pounds. But it feels sturdy too.
Windows Vista is only option.
The CD drive is making a horrible noise and vibrating all to hell. This will have to be replaced.

I tried downgrading to XP, but couldn't find drivers for several things. I slipstreamed SP2 and all the drivers I could find into my install disk, but still no luck. I had to change the bios setting for the SATA drive to put it in a different mode and then XP detected the disk. After all that trouble though, still no drivers for several things.

Then I had some trouble re-loading Vista. Came with Dell's re-install disk, but it kept sticking at the "Completing Installation" screen. I'm not sure which of these fixed the problem, but it was definitely one of these:
1. Re-install Media-Direct first. This re-creates your partitions to exactly the right size.
2. Load the SATA driver from the driver disk during the partition selection process.

I would prefer to have XP Pro to connect to my Win03 server at home - policies, Symantec AV, WSUS, shared network drive, etc. I guess I could upgrade to Vista Ultimate for an extra $160 or so. But, I don't have any software that takes advantage of Vista... in fact, some things may not even run on it.

Maybe I should put Linux on it instead. What are the chances it will have all the drivers?