<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:45 PM, JK <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jknapka@kneuro.net">jknapka@kneuro.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Jeremy T. Bouse wrote:<br>
<br>
> Sounds as if your m-i-l got one of their XPS series systems... They are<br>
> big and ugly but supposedly the best Dell as as they're made for gamers<br>
> and such. Inspiron series are meant more for a business laptop and a<br>
> step up from the Latitude series. Granted mine isn't as light as my old<br>
> Sony Vaio PictureBook but it's not as heavy as my old Toshiba<br>
> SatellitePro either... I carried it back and forth every day to work<br>
> until boss offered me a dual-head display workstation if I left it at<br>
> home :)<br>
<br>
<br>
I thought the Latitude were the "business" grade and Inspiron were the<br>
"home" grade laptops? Latitude definitely seems to be a step up in<br>
price, anyway.<br>
<br>
I've got a Latitude D610, supplied by my employer, that I've been using<br>
happily for SW development for almost four years now. Anything that<br>
runs acceptably on this machine is gonna fly on real production hardware.<br>
<br>
I liked it enough that I got a second one off eBay for personal use.<br>
Both are still going strong, although I had to get the motherboard<br>
replaced on the work machine due to a failed RAM socket -- but Dell<br>
paid for that under the extended warranty.</blockquote><div><br></div><div>My experience with Latitudes was the exact opposite, which is what cemented me with IBM Thinkpads (until recently when I went Mac). My wife and m-i-l both had D600s and would have issues like the keyboard keys or supports breaking, or random flakiness requiring reboots to fix. This also happened after a complete system re-install (I thought it was just WinBlows being, well, itself). I have no doubt that part of it was because they were in the hands of non-computer people users. For example, my m-i-l clicks yes on ANY button, so she now, frequently, gets re-images on her machine. So my comments should be tempered with having to support bad users on the Dell equipment as well.</div>
<div><br></div><div>-Scott</div></div>