The Dell i9300 saga begins. (For me)

Well im now an official Lap "Noob". Which is probably a step up from, "not having one at all".I purchased the i9300 w/ the $800 coupon on April 3rd, took about 7-8 days to receive it. (would have been sooner if
UPS would ship in the evening, whos home at 10am nowadays anyway?)So I had to drive to the hub here TWICE. (Once for the lappy and secondly for the backback.)....Anyway, i get it, love the carbon fiber quicksnap, dont like the fact that i didnt get a driver or XP cd.(the rig has a xp cd utility that i later found, after hours of forum searching.)So i realize that , from all the forums, it is a good idea to reformat. So i first try it with the newly/only made xp cd and the driver downloads from dell.com....But i guess i took the partition advice from "forumers" too seriously and made THREE partitions(IDIOT!). I have since ordered, and received, the driver cd and have reformatted a SECOND time with one partition. Well I know my machine is lacking in certain areas but good in others.
(Lacking)
Good Screen (I got the default one, Cmon Im Broke here!)
Better wireless card (heard there are some bugs with the 2200)
1gig or more of RAM (i got 512mb, im a big "broke" gamer so i got the minimum to play)
(Good)
256mb graphics card
60gb (7200rpm)hd
17in screen (hey, even though i didnt get the good one, its still a big plus to have)
All in all, i extremely proud of my purchase. I couldnt of done it without this forum and you guys. (cause i swear i read every damn review and opinion post during my choosing of a notebook.)So my questions are these;
- Any future upgrade recommendations? (RAM I assume is one)
- Are the "current" graphics drivers from dell.com okay?
- Any ideas on how i can test how this machine handles some graphics.
(mainly to make sure my , first ever, ATTEMPTS at reinstalling worked)
- Is there anywhere in xp where i can see the rpm speed of hd.
(Just to be sure)
- or just any comments in general.

Thanks for all the informative threads and i hope my newbizm to laptops and to this forum goes away some day

Dell Inspiron 9300
*60gb hd, 7200rpm
*256mb Nvidia Go 6800
*512mb Memory
*Intel-Pro 2200 (800b/g)

 

Glad to hear you enjoy your purchase. I have also heard problems with the 2200, see how much a 2915 will run you on ebay (A/B/G) Might be able to pick it up cheap. Just check around. It will be a straight-forward install.

*Dell Inspiron 9300, P-M 1.86ghz 533mhz FSB, 1GB DDR2 533mhz ram, 17inch UXGA+ screen with TrueLife, 256mb Nvidia GeForce 6800, 60gb 7200rpm drive, XP Pro SP2, WiFi*

*Sony MDR-G74SL Headphones for music and gaming, best 40 dollar pair i have ever bought!*

*The Sony PSP, The Portable PS2* *Proud owner since 3/27/05*

 

Thanks for the ideas mojo and Heart. Im gonna play with the rig when i get home. And as far as getting the new wireless card, i probably will do that if i get fed up. Ive just heard that the majority of the issues with the card have revolved around the Linksys routers. I dont use that but im sure this sneaky little network card will come up with a problem for me.

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*Dell Inspiron 9300
- Pentium M 1.67ghz
- 60gb HD (7200prm)
- 512mb ddr RAM
- 256mb Nvidia Go 6800

 

I just got my I9300 last night and spent the better part of the evening TRYING to surf the web from the couch in the livingroom instead of at my desk in my office.

All my problems stemmed from the fact that I installed a wireless network a year and a half ago so my sons could have internet access in their room without me having to do all the wiring and I forgot everything I had done to set it up. So, when I turned on the I9300 and it immediately detected the network (LinkSys router 802.11b) I was very excited, easy right! Wrong! I had of course done the smart thing and "protected" my network so I wouldn't have a gaggle of college students parked in front of my house surfing for free. Well it seems that it worked because it sure kept me off.

Let me just say that 2 1/2 hours later I was finally able to access to the router and find the WEP key I needed for the laptop to gain access. Now, whenever I power up the I9300, presto, I'm on the network.

The short version of the story. Intel PRO 2915 (802.11 a/b/g) works just fine with a Linksys Wireless B - model BEFW11S4 v4, once the owner learns how to access it.

** Dell Inspiron 9300, Intel Pentium M 740 (1.73 GHz), 17" UltraSharp WUXGA w/TrueLife, 1GB RAM, NVIDA GeForce Go 6800, 60 GB @7200 HD, 8x DVD+/-RW double-layer burner, XP Professional, Intel PRO Wireless 2915 (802.11 a/b/g), Extra 9-cell battery **

 

hi there, yet another to join the evil Dell empire.

yea the main thing is memory -- if you could bump that to 1gb it would probably help a lot. I wouldn't worry so much about having the lower-res screen -- as most ppl complains about going blind while trying to see text on a 17" 1920x1200 screen anyway...

Since you mentioned about being a gamer, and that you've already reformated the HD, reinstalled windows, etc etc, I would *strongly* recommend you uninstall the video driver that Dell supplies, and go to a site like video2go to download the latest Nvidia drivers -- as you might see a *substential* performance improvement.

A note thou, make sure you FULLY UNINSTALL the old driver before attempting to install the newer version.

As to benchmarks -- check out the thread "post your 3dmark05 scores here" [ ] basically, just download futuremark's 3dmark05 bench, and run it w/ the default settings. it's not all that accurate, but hey it's something i guess...

cheers,

yass

 

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

 

The only way I know how to check on your harddrive speed is to go to device manager look up your harddrive, highlight and copy the model to your clip board and paste it in google. You should get all the information you need that way. If anyone else has any other suggestions I'd like to hear them.

I know things, things that could bore people to death.