[PLUG] Inspiron 2650 - Good or Bad?

[AthlonRob]

On Tue, 2002-12-03 at 10:02, Scott VanHoosen wrote:
> At my work, we have purchased many Dell laptops over the last few
> years. Some have been very solid, but we've had a couple lemons. One
> was a refurbished laptop, and we had the motherboard replaced FOUR
> times for various reasons, in about a one year period. The last time
> they replaced it, they ran some more tests, which showed the
> motherboard to be fine, but the memory failed. They replaced that too,
> and now it is finally a stable machine.

I've heard a lot of that - laptops being shipped dead.  I can wait,
though, for a replacement... since this deal is so darned good.  What I
don't hear a lot of is laptops that are shipped good dying in a year...
which is a good thing.

> One other machine had a problem with the pointing stick causing the
> mouse to drift. It was intermittant, and when it started drifting, it
> would accelerate. Soon it was like a video game trying to click on
> "Shut Down" or any other settings.

I have that problem on an old Toshiba ... a very old one.  It can get
interesting.  This model, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have the
pointing stick - just that ackward and hard-to-use touchpad.  Optical
mouse it is!  <g>

> We have always purchased the expensive ($300) extended 3 year onsite
> warranty for most of the business laptops, and we've had to take
> advantage of the warranty on several of the machines. However, the
> other 2/3 of the Dell laptops we've purchased have been great.

As I'm a poor college student, I'm going with the 1-year base warranty. 
Do you know, if at the end of the warranty, they'll off you an extension
for a bit more than you would have paid at first?

> We have set up Linux on three or four of them, and haven't had any
> major problems.

That's what I like to hear.  :-)

As I said in my last email - the NIC is about the only thing I'm unsure
of.  If worst comes to worst, I can pop in an old 10BaseT NIC I have
floating about (from the Toshiba mentioned above - which is currently
dead).

> The Inspirons are designed more for the gamer or hacker or home user,
> with less reliability but lots of bells and whistles. The Latitudes are
> business machines, generally leaner but more stable and tested.

Well, I'd classify myself as a hacker/gamer/home user, definitely.  :-)

Thanks for the added input, I appreciate it!

:::off to google about for the NIC:::

-- 
Rob                                |  If not safe,
Email and Jabber:                  |    one can never be free.
athlonrob at data dot 4t3 dot com  |