I didn't have the time to do anything useful in OSS land recently. For various reasons that I won't explain here, I've been unable to use my home computers for several weeks. But I just received my shiny new Inspiron 8200 from Dell, and boy, what a change this makes !

The Good

• The UXGA ASV screen is absolutely fabulous. For us, mere mortals, this means a resolution of 1600x1400, 15" diagonal, and, much more importantly, some refined characteristics (in terms of contrast & color fidelity, refresh-rate, etc...). Playing movies is cool with this, unlike most LCD screens I've used before. This screen is currently €300 extra from a regular Inspiron, but it's probably worth it if you're fond of that kind of details.

• Very surprisingly, the keyboard feels extremely good too on this machine. A few Dell users I know told me their keyboard was "bulky" and made of cheap plastic. That certainly is true, but for some reason, my fingers literally fly on this beast !!. I nearly type as fast as on a regular keyboard with it.

• I had no problem installing RedHat 8.0 from scratch on the machine, except that XFree86 wasn't able to use the 1600x1400 resolution correctly in VESA mode. However, downloading the proprietary drivers from NVidia's site solved the problem. I'll soon replace it with Debian 3.0 however, and I don't know if things will be as easy..

The Bad

• Well, the NVidia XFree86 driver is nice and all, but it splashes a huge company logo each time the server is started. Very frankly, that's damn annoying, and I'll try to see if there is some way to remove it.

• There's a big fan within this beast, which I suppose is used to remove the heat generated from the processor. This is very surprising at first, because the fan starts and stops randomly. It takes some time to get used to the noise, though it's not too bothering. Compared to that, my old laptop was a dead brick, though I suppose that all Intel-class laptops share this "feature" now :-)

• Generally speaking, the whole laptop seems very polished but fragile. Many parts seem to be made of thin plastic that won't resist much to pressure and not-so-exceptional conditions. The DVD drive seems to be crying "break me" when you open it, for example. No wonder that Dell sells Latitudes with approximately the same configuration but stronger casing for €1000 more :-)

  Very fortunately, I'm not a road warrior, and I'm pretty careful at handling laptops (/me crossing fingers).

The Ugly

• nothing particularly distateful on the laptop itself. But UPS, which seems to have an exclusive distribution agreement with Dell in Europe did screw up things by large. I'm not going to detail it, but they've been clearly incompetent and refused to admit it on the phone despite numerous calls (e.g. claiming that my correct address wasn't valid for example !!). End result: five additional days for delivery, and numerous frustating phone calls/faxes with UPS and Dell representatives.

Conclusion

This laptop is very good, but I wouldn't have bought it if it wasn't for the screen. If you're sensitive to this kind of details, go for it. Otherwise, you'd probably better consider some better alternative, i.e. some made with better plastic, or with a well supported video card :-)

OK, now back to hacking the stuff I like :-)