25
Jun
XPS M1210 - My New Laptop
So I finally took delivery of my beautiful new laptop - a Dell XPS M1210. A 12″ beauty with 2gb of ram, a 160gb hard disk and the extra ‘multimedia’ pack which, in Australia, consists of the integrated webcam, a copy of Skype and some earbuds.
I’m in love.
Click the link for unboxing photographs and a micro-review…
Okay, so my new baby is running Vista, which initially filled me with dread. I had promised that I wouldn’t touch Vista, simply because XP was a perfectly fine operating system for my needs and I disliked Vista’s system requirements. But you know, I like Vista. My sidebar now holds a variety of gadgets that tell me how much download I have left on my internet connection, a collection of my favourite photographs and my bloglines feeds; the backgrounds are spectacular on my clearview screen and the whole thing does run quite well.
Having said that. I have had the ‘Blue Screen Of Death’ a couple of times, mostly in the middle of Skype, and there has been some randomness in relation to hibernation/suspension. On the whole, Vista is an acceptable operating system with some outward prettiness but some possible internal instability.
But other than that, this laptop is a beauty. Screen visability when on your lap is fine for a 12″, it isn’t hot at all, is light and while it isn’t as thin as some larger notebooks, gives the distinct impression of smallness.
I’m not going to harp on about benchmarks and performance. There are so many more reviewers that have already done that for me.
What I am going to say however, is the one thing I couldn’t find out about before I bought.
Sims2. Otherwise known as Sims 2.
I have all the expansion packs and a huge amount of user-created content, and it runs beautifully. Sims2 installed flawlessly, loads far quicker than my old desktop and the graphics run very well at Medium specs. There is little waiting for things to load and no lag. Although I am running the optional NVidia graphics card, so your mileage under the integrated graphics option will vary.
I’m also thrilled to bits about the battery life. I opted for the 9-cell extended battery, and while it does stick out the back somewhat, I can easily grab almost five hours of browser and word processing without worries, and can get around 3 hours of sims in, all with my wifi enabled. Cool.
I’m very happy indeed.
And now for some gratuitous unboxing photos:
Box still sealed…
Box open..
