Førsteinntrykk av Dell Inspiron 8500.

[johndoe144]

Her er et laaangt innlegg som en kar som nylig har fått sin 8500 har skrevet på Dells forumsider. Tenkte det kunne være interessant lesing for dere som har bestilt/lurer på å bestille 8500.

 

 

2Ghz processor, 768 Mb RAM, 40Gb HDD, DVD, 1920x1200 display, 64Mb Geforce4 4200 Go graphics. It arrived a few days ago to replace my ancient and broken Inspiron 7000, and I thought I'd post my first impressions.

 

 

Short version:

 

Not bad, but with a number of annoyances, one of them serious. While the hardware itself is mostly great (with one glaring exception), I think the ultra-high-res wide-aspect display was a mistake. It's not all that useful, and the OS/app support for it isn't quite there yet.

 

 

Long version:

 

The 8500 is a big beast. Desk footprint is quite a bit bigger than the 7000, although it's thinner and significantly lighter. The blue/grey coloured plastic shell is actually fine; it's no Powerbook, but is nowhere near as fugly as the photos on the website suggest. (Most of them show it with a blank black screen, which is very unflattering.) Build quality looks solid (with the aforementioned glaring exception); the DVD tray feels a bit flimsy, but hey, it's always replaceable. One nice surprise was that fan noise on the 8500 is much quieter than on the 7000. Hard disk noise is about the same, but with 768Mb of memory you tend not to hear the HD very often :-)

 

Okay, let's get the glaring exception out of the way so I can stop having to mention it in parentheses. The keyboard on this thing is *horrible*. The keys themselves are fine, but supports are either inadequate or left out entirely; the keyboard flexes *visibly* and noisily downward whenever you press a key. Words can't describe quite how cheap, shoddy and distracting this feels in use. I honestly cannot understand how this ever got into a high-end system design; it's like trying to type on a wobbleboard. Maybe you get used to it in time, but I'd be very surprised.

 

Performance is excellent, as you'd expect with a spec like this. Boot/startup is surprisingly zippy; I'd heard WinXP was a dog in this area. Apps also startup fast, even biggies like Mozilla. So far I've not found anything that'll give it serious pause. The one 3D game I've tried (Morrowind, a reasonably eye-candy-rich first-person RPG) runs perfectly smoothly at 1600x1200. Incidentally, for the 99% of you hopelessly confused by NVIDIA's marketing doublespeak, the 4200 Go is a "good" Geforce4 (corresponding to the desktop Ti series, with vertex shader support), whereas all previous mobile Geforce4 parts have been "bad" Geforce4s (corresponding to the desktop MX series, which are substantially less advanced than the Geforce3).

 

Audio quality is generally superb (through headphones - I haven't really tried the built-in speakers). There's an annoying tick before and after playing isolated samples such as theme sounds; it doesn't happen (or at least isn't noticeable) when it's part of ongoing audio, e.g. in a game. There are some posts about this in the audio forum; it may be a fairly isolated issue rather than affecting all machines of this model. The baseline volume is *extremely* high, painfully so, which is problematic when it comes to control. The volume control buttons built into the case step up/down in fairly large increments, so that in a quiet environment a single press takes you from mute to too-loud, and you need to bring up the volume dialog to get a comfortable level. The finer-grained wheel volume control used on the 7000 would have been better here.

 

And so we come to the display.

 

The display itself is a thing of beauty. Brightness and contrast are great, and Cleartype-enabled text is just drop-dead gorgeous. That's the good news. The bad news is twofold.

 

First, the aspect ratio. I had major reservations about this when placing the order, and using it hasn't changed my mind. I just don't see the point of a wide-aspect display for a computer. About the only time it's a plus would be watching widescreen movies on DVD, which is all well and good but hardly justifies such a major change. Maybe it's just me. I'm a programmer; I spend most of my computing time in text editor, command prompt and browser windows, and in all three of these vertical screen real estate is more useful than horizontal. This is particularly true of Web pages, many of which are designed (by idiots, admittedly) at fixed widths and leave half or two-thirds of a 1920-pixel-wide screen as blank space. This display isn't a normal 15.4" display with extra space tacked onto the sides, it's a *shorter* but wider display which happens to have a 15.4" diagonal. (Rough measurements: 33cm wide by 21cm high, compared to 30cm by 23cm on my 15.4" 7000.) I don't think it's a good tradeoff.

 

As a side note, anyone planning to play games on this model should be aware that the default factory setting for changing resolution is wrong, and it's not hugely obvious how to fix it (or even that it's fixable; I only found it partway through writing this, and have had to go back and delete some perfectly good ranting). Obviously, few if any games run at 1920x1200; they all want normal aspect ratios like 1600x1200, 1024x768, 800x600 etc. By default, when you change resolution, the display is stretched to fill the whole screen. This means that not only is everything blurry because you're running an LCD in non-native resolution, but everything is squished. The solution is as follows:

 

- Open the Display Properties dialog

 

- Click on Settings tab

 

- Click on Advanced button, which brings up another dialog

 

- Click on Geforce4 4200 Go tab

 

- There should now be a peculiar tree menu floating off the left edge of the dialog. Interface standards, schminterface standards. If there isn't, look for a small green arrow button on the left edge, which opens the floating menu thingy when clicked.

 

- On the floating menu thingy, click on nView Display Mode. This changes the content of the current tab.

 

- Click on Device Settings >> Screen Adjustment, which pops up yet another dialog.

 

- Select "Use fixed aspect ratio scaling"

 

- OK your way out of the 3 currently active dialogs.

 

Normal-aspect modes will now be displayed vertically letterboxed, at the right aspect ratio, and 1600x1200 mode is now native-res crisp with no blurring or squishing. 800x600 is still blurred, which surprised me as it should be able to just double native pixels horizontally and vertically. Not sure why that is. Ah well.

 

Right, side note over. (I should probably cross-post that bit to the video forum, if there is one.) Where was I? Ah yes, display bad news, part 2. Please forgive me if this next bit comes across as patronizing; I do a lot of computer graphics work, and have lost track of what's common knowledge and what isn't.

 

Bit of background: there's a standard measurement called DPI, or Dots Per Inch, which says what a pixel corresponds to in real dimensions. It's usually used when talking about printers and scanners, but applies to displays as well. The idea is that most humans don't care about pixels, they just want to view things at a comfortable size, and it's the computer's job to use as many pixels as necessary to make things that size. Higher res just means more pixels for a given size, which translates to higher quality: less blockiness, jagged lines etc.

 

The 8500 ships with the standard Windows DPI setting of 96. With the 1920x1200 screen, it's effectively lying, claiming that its screen is 20" wide rather than the actual 13". The computer therefore uses the number of pixels that would make for comfortable viewing on a screen that was *really* 20" wide, and everything comes out very very tiny. (How tiny? Taskbar icons two millimeters square in a default XP theme. That's not hyperbole. I measured.) Now, some people with perfect vision will take advantage of this to cram huge amounts of stuff onscreen. Many people (myself included, and I still have pretty good vision) find this uncomfortable or even difficult to read, and prefer to have a bit less stuff onscreen but at a more readable size. No problem, we just change the DPI setting (Display Properties, Settings tab, Advanced >> General tab) to an accurate figure of around 148, right?

 

Well, sort of. This partly works. Unfortunately, 96 DPI has been the default and de facto standard for a long time. It's not just that most users don't know about the possibility of changing screen DPI; a lot of software developers and (especially) web page authors don't either. And a lot of the ones that do know don't care, because people with high-DPI displays are still a tiny minority. Quite often, things are specified in pixel measurements (which aren't adjusted for DPI) instead of measures like points or dialog units (which are). So some text on a web page is the right size while other text is unreadably tiny. Dialog boxes get messed up as expanding text pushes widgets out of place; ironically, this even happens on some of the Display Properties dialogs. Amateur-hour pixel-based GUI applications (most media players, f'rinstance), which were barely usable even on real 96 DPI displays, become unusably awful in shrink-o-vision. Most bitmaps - application toolbar icons, the vast majority of Web images - ignore DPI completely. (Historically there were good reasons for this, but modern computers are more than fast enough to resize images while preserving decent quality.) All in all, it's a mess.

 

Dell are not at fault here. High-DPI displays are the future, and software developers (myself included; this has been quite an eye-opener) need to wake up to that fact, and customers need to shout at them when they don't. However, this is not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, running a high-DPI display is going to involve a certain amount of pain and ugliness. You might want to bear that in mind before shelling out extra cash for one. If you want a standard-DPI display, Dell UK are now offering a 1280x768 option where they weren't before; that's about right for the screen size.

 

 

That's all I can think of for the moment. Sheesh, that's long. Hope somebody finds it useful.

[joenohr]

And another one ...

 

 

I have recently received my i8500 with the following spec

 

Inspiron i8500 Pentium 4-M 2.4 GHz

15.4" WUXGA

1024Mb 226MHz DDR (1*1024Mb)

60Gb IDE

64Mb NV28 Video

2 * 72Whr LI-ION Battery

 

I thought I would try and lay to rest some of the guessing with regards to what this machine actually looks like and performs like etc.

 

I have an i8000, 512 Mb , PIII 1Ghz, 15" LCD to compare to so many of my comments may reflect the differences.

 

 

15.4" WUXGA Screen

==================

 

This is a truly amazing component. I really wasn't sure at first because it is very different from the i8000 but after a few hours you realise that the loss of about one inch in height is not that

 

big a deal when you consider the native resolution means you get as much on the screen. In fact it is the extra real estate from the width that has already proved to be useful. The only issue I

 

have now with the widescreen is that some websites use tables that 'Fit to width' so sometimes you have an option to press on the left of the web page and then you have to move the mouse cursor

 

over to the extreme right (a long way) for another option!!

 

One obvious difference is the brightness. This screen now makes the i8000 look yellow and stained. The whites are very white. Viewing angles a far superior and you get a little Dell tool to adjust

 

the font sizes if the are too small.

 

 

Case Material/design

====================

 

Now to the case....

 

While the base is most definitely plastic it is painted with a metallic silver effect. The blue surrounds are done in a similar way to give a very 'brushed steel' kind of effect. I think it is

 

pretty nice. The screen front is the same. The top is very nice and seems to be metallic in construction. The top is lighter silver than the rest of the machine with the new Dell propeller across

 

it. Some people will definitely wish that the whole machine was made of the same material as the top, it looks pretty good.

 

Build quality in most cases is far superior. Anyone heard their i8000 'creak' when you pick it up as the casing flexes under the weight. This doesn't happen with the i8500. The base and the screen

 

are a lot more rigid and not made of a similar brittle plastic to the i8000. The screen doesn't flex and the hinges are more solid. I like the LEDs in the right hand hinge.

 

My biggest criticism is of the keyboard. It is very soft and flexible and tends to bounce a bit. In addition the buttons that you are supposed to use with the pointing stick I think will rarely be

 

used as the need to be pressed a long way. The blue surround does not look as bad as people think.

 

I ordered the Venice blue snap on cover with my machine and, whilst it makes the machine look very different from the outside, it doesn't look as good as the silver native colour. The covers also

 

add a little to the thickness of the machine.

 

The two spindles issue seems to have cropped up quite a bit but it definitely makes the machine lighter. I order a spare 72Wh battery rather than the modular 60WH battery that goes in the media

bay. It is cheaper and means that you can use one battery after the other with the DVD player in place.

 

 

Machine General

===============

 

 

i8KFanGui 2.0 seems to work fine and reports that the heat of the cpu, HD and GPU run far cooler than the i8000 for similar apps. The bottom of the machine does get hot near the hard drive but

 

nothing like the 8000. One cooling vent is on the top of the machine so there may not be such an issue if you use the machine on your lap. The fans and the hard drive are not nearly as noisy as my

 

old machine. In fact you can barely hear the drive.

 

Another neat feature that I have really only just realised is that the RJ45 and RJ11 ports are at the back of the machine. This may seem trivial but I always use a mouse with my machine and am

 

right handed. On my i8000 these ports are inconveniently situated on the right side of the machine, towards the front edge. This means that I have a tangled mess of cables that get in the way of my

 

mouse.

 

All in all I think Dell have made a great job of the new Inspiron form.

I would have liked one more PCMCIA and 2 more USB slots (and maybe a DVD RW) but you can’t have everything in the first go.

 

I’m off to play but if anyone has specific questions then don’t hesitate to post and I’ll see what I can do. I will do a more accurate review of performance, heat etc. once I have used it a bit more.. I will post some pictures soon

 

Cheers

 

MAD

[ddd-king]

Møkka innlegg!!!

[johndoe144]

Møkka innlegg!!!

 

 

Ja, hvis du aldri i verden har tenkt på å kjøpe deg en Inspiron 8500, så var dette sikkert et møkkainnlegg. Men da burde du også ha latt være å klikke deg inn på tråden. Overskriften burde være ganske talende...

 

Jeg vil tro at mange som sitter og lurer på om de skal kjøpe I8500 vil synes det er svært nyttig å lese hva andre, som faktisk har prøvd maskinen, synes om den.

 

Men, beklager hvis jeg ødela dagen din med møkkainnlegget mitt.

[joenohr]

Møkka innlegg!!!

 

Dust!!

 

Håper for din del at du ikke leste innleggene før du fant ut at det var 'møkkainnlegg'. Tenk så unødvendig det hadde vært!

[ponke]

Tusen takk, johndoe144!

Fint at noen samler litt informasjon hit da jeg vet av erfaring at mange skriver lengre erfaringer om produkter på aktuelle forum (meg inkludert).

 

Flott initiativ

 

Fant dette veldig nyttig da jeg håper på å gå til innkjøp av bærbar i slutten av sommeren. Data-fri sommer :-?

 

Takk igjen!

 

Mvh kjello2 (jeg har skiftet brukernavn, det nye er ponke)

[Qwem]

hei...

 

se på dell sine forum og....under support og communities. Utrolig mye info om 8500 der.

 

Men må jo innrømme at det er godt å ha norsk forum og da.

[Lostfields]

Fikk min 8500 idag, og følelsene er blanda egentlig. Tastaturet er ikke topp da du ser at det buler litt opp midtre høyre del, pluss at den er litt løs i fisken... litt for dårlig synes nå jeg. I tillegg til dette er det en forbanna irriterende plopplyd både før og etter lydspor slik som wavfiler og andre ting som tar i bruk lydkortet....

 

ringte inn til dell og de sa at det var et kjent problem og teknikerne jobba på spreng, hvis dette ikke blir fikset innen 14 dager kommer jeg til å returnere denne pc'en...

 

ellers så ser PC'en ganske grei ut, et solid chassis i forhold til den gamle modellen.

 

 

EDIT:

Fant noen uorginale drivere fra en som posta på dell sine forum som vil løse den tickinga før og etter et lydspor. Disse driverne er uorginale men funker myyyyeee bedre enn det skvipet som dell sender med PC'ene sine... fremdeles misfornøyd med tastaturet, men men... hva kan en forlange av en PC til 14400, pluss frakt

 

http://support.fujitsu-siemens.de/DriverCD...7117_MSLogo.exe

[Lostfields]

Kan ikke akkurat si at jeg så veldig fornøyd med i8500 faktisk, tror jeg kommer til å levere den tilbake da det er 4 områder som ikke er så veldig bra. Har nesten på følelsen at Dell var for rask med å ta denne ut på markedet...

 

- Kommer av og til en høyfrekvent konstant lyd fra PC'en, dette er ikke vifte eller cpu hvertfall...

- Min fryser seg uten videre, ingenting reagerer. Dette skjer bare når jeg er surrer i windows, ikke under spilling.

- Tastaturet merkes litt billig ut, litt løst og slapt bare...

- Lydkortet har dårlig dvalemodus, du hører at lydkortet slår seg av og på.

 

Så, til de av dere som lurer på å kjøpe en i8500 bør vente litt til andre generasjonen av i8500 kommer... ellers så er det en helt topp PC faktisk, ganske så fornøyd med den bortsett fra det skvipet ovenfor.

 

Testa 3DMark også, da har jeg P4-M 2Ghz, 256DDR, 64MB GeForce4 4400 Go (originalt oppsett)

 

3DMark 2001 SE

8600 poeng i 1024x768 oppløsning

5500 poeng i 1600x1050 oppløsning

 

3DMark 2003

1060 poeng i 1024x769 oppløsning

[joenohr]

Fikk min 8500 idag, og følelsene er blanda egentlig. Tastaturet er ikke topp da du ser at det buler litt opp midtre høyre del, pluss at den er litt løs i fisken... litt for dårlig synes nå jeg. I tillegg til dette er det en forbanna irriterende plopplyd både før og etter lydspor slik som wavfiler og andre ting som tar i bruk lydkortet....

 

ringte inn til dell og de sa at det var et kjent problem og teknikerne jobba på spreng, hvis dette ikke blir fikset innen 14 dager kommer jeg til å returnere denne pc'en...

 

ellers så ser PC'en ganske grei ut, et solid chassis i forhold til den gamle modellen.

 

 

EDIT:

Fant noen uorginale drivere fra en som posta på dell sine forum som vil løse den tickinga før og etter et lydspor. Disse driverne er uorginale men funker myyyyeee bedre enn det skvipet som dell sender med PC'ene sine... fremdeles misfornøyd med tastaturet, men men... hva kan en forlange av en PC til 14400, pluss frakt

http://support.fujitsu-siemens.de/DriverCD/Files_gepackt/LIFEBOOK/WinXP/Sound/Intel/440MX/SigmaTel_STAC9723/V5.12.01.7117/WinXP_Sound_440MX-SigmaTel_STAC9723V5.12.01.7117_MSLogo.exe

 

 

Jepp... jeg la inn driveren og da forsvant lyden.... ALL LYD !

Nå har jeg ikke sett noe særlig nærmere på det, så det kan være jeg har gjort noe feil.

[Qwem]

Hei

 

Fikk min I8500 i dag. WUXGA, 2.2GHz, 256MB ram, Geforce4, 60GB disk.

 

Jeg har ikke merket noen ulåter fra den. Må si at jeg er veldig fornøyd. Kvaliteten på skjermen er enorm. Sinnsykt bra. Mener fortsatt at dell burde advare folk om hvor smått ting blir på en wuxga skjerm, spesielt når alle skjermene har like bra spesifikasjoner bortsett fra oppløsninga. Men jeg har vendt meg til det alt. Det er utrolig klart og skarpt. Jeg kjører på originalinstillinger i windows, dvs etter å ha reinstallert winxp pro. Ikke noe problem å lese. Blir ikke sliten heller.

Fikk 8900 eller noe slikt i 3dmark2001. Syns jeg må si at det er akseptabelt. Prøvde americas army i 1920x1200 med topp settings over alt. antialiazing og hele pakka. Da hakka det, men det hadde det nok gjort på alle maskiner tenker jeg.

 

Nei...anbefaler maskina. Du får en massiv desktop. Plass til utrolig mye.

 

Fornøyd med vekta på pc'en og. Og tastaturet. Meget bra syns jeg. Syns det ikke virker billig jeg. Ikke hørt noe til noen poppelyder fra lydkortet. Kan hende jeg er heldig. Du hører da det skrur seg av, men det er ikke noe sjenerende.

 

Eirik

[Amos]

Jeg òg har fått min Inspiron 8500, og jeg må si jeg er kjempefornøyd. Valget mitt sto mellom Zepto Znote 4100 og Dell Inspiron 8500, og jeg angrer absolutt ikke på at jeg valgte Dell. Jeg er kjempefornøyd med skjerm, grafikk, cpu-ytelse, tastatur og alt. Jeg har ikke merket noe til de problemene som tidligere poster har kicket på.

Jeg vil absolutt anbefale denne!

 

Kjekt om Barbara.no kunne tatt en test på denne. Kunne vært artig å hørt hva de mener...

[Lostfields]

det kan nok hende at jeg har fått 1. generasjon av den PC'en, ettersom jeg fikk den litt tidlig... en dårlig mandags PC... min ligger i esken og venter på linjegods

[lykkeliten]

Har nå hatt min i nesten to uker og må nå begynne å bestemme meg for om jeg skal beholde den eller ikke.

 

Det som taler mest for å returnere den er det massive prisraset på bærbare for tiden. Prisene stuper jo noe vannvittig for tiden, og siden jeg egentlig ikke trenger maskinen nå, så har jeg tro på at jeg får langt mer for pengene om noen måneder allerede. Men slik kan man jo stadig tenke når det gjelder datautstyr....

 

Maskinen er jeg generelt fornøyd med. Tastaturet er noe rart, slik også andre har nevnt, men det er litt vanesak også. At lydkortet gir fra seg en liten lyd når en slår det av/på plager ikke meg. CD/DVD spilleren er langt fra stillegående, nesten plagsom. Batteritiden er jeg fornøyd med, til mitt bruk holder den faktisk i omlag 3 timer. Maskinen er ganske stor, så den har sine begrensninger pga. dette. Har skjermoppløsning på 1680x1050 og er svært fornøyd med dette. Skjermen er noe av det jeg er mest fornøyd med. Ser mange klager på 16x9 formatet, men jeg synes dette fungerer svært bra.

 

Så alt i alt er jeg fornøyd med maskinen, men vurdere å henge litt på gjerdet mens prisene raser videre....