Another of my recent toys has appeared by way of work – a Dell M1330 laptop. My boss is very good about appropriating what is required, and even humoured me by way of fulfilling my request for a laptop. I prefer them for work – easy to cart into meetings and ensure work gets done, and to take home when required and avoid polluting one’s home system. But, of course, you always suffer in terms of power and especially disk IO. So after my initial attempt at acquiring a MacBook failed, I went browsing to find something small, powerful and cheap. And unusually, got most of what I wanted.
The M1330 is Dell’s trendy 13“ media portable. I use the word trendy without any intention of it being taken seriously – this is no Apple box, and one could charitably describe it as ugly. Rather than stick with the cheap, professional and practical lines they’re known for they’ve tried to make it cool. So we’ve got plastic contrasted with a horrid metal veneer, and rounded off with the most unattractive keyboard ever found outside of a ZX Spectrum. The ‘cheap’ doesn’t end there either – it comes with a remote (a credit-card style remote gone horribly, horribly wrong) and they missed a bay door on the SD card slot, instead opting for a cheap filler card. And the worst part is, for minimal savings, they’ve made it look much tackier than it ever should.
And that’s because the hardware makes up for a lot of bad aesthetics. If you skip the horrid glossy screen, there’s not much else to complain about. Core 2 Duo (only 2.0Ghz, but it was ordered in November), 3Gb of RAM, slot-loading drive (which are godsends on laptops) and a nVidia 8400 mobility card (because friends don’t let friends use on-board video). It would have been nice to have a DVI port rather than the dodgy VGA and HDMI ports they’ve thrown in, but otherwise it’s really rather smashing. And only 13” at that.
And there’s one cheap thing that is very nice – at slightly over £700 it’s cheaper than a MacBook. Yes, you’re not going to win geek chic awards with it, and you have to put up with the monstrous creature that is Vista, but otherwise it’s reasonably fast, portable and plays WoW for those quiet moments. You could do a lot worse in a PC laptop, especially for the price.
Of course, you could buy yourself a MBP, but that’s something for a future post.
Oh, and apologies for the horrid pun in the title. I feel horrid about it, really.
