Ten months ago (March 2009) I got a new work notebook to replace a broken and out of warranty Thinkpad T41. After going back and forth between the Lenovo Thinkpad x61s and the Dell XPS M1330 I decided on the M1330. I picked the XPS because I could get double the cpu speed and drive size with a wide screen display plus an extra nine cell battery for less money. This was just around the time the Thinkpad X400 was coming out and it was too new to find any good reviews. I started this post around the time I got the XPS and now seems like a good time to finish it.
Here is what I like:
- The display is excellent–very crisp and bright with and I like the wide screen aspect
- Very light with standard battery
- It’s great to have a fast, KVM capable notebook that runs multiple guests effortlessly.
- Suspend and hibernate work 90% of the time.
Here is what I wish was different:
- The ‘Home’ ‘Page Up’ and other navigation keys are all in a vertical line down the right side of the keyboard–It’s bizarre, but I’ve mostly gotten used to it.
- Battery life has seriously faded–running under Vista (on very rare occasions) I’m lucky to get one hour of use out of the regular battery. Running Fedora I can stretch the same battery to two hours by cranking all the settings in powertop. When I first got the battery I could get three hours out of it. The same rapid decline has happened with the nine cell battery. I don’t travel that much with this notebook and I exercise the batteries occasionally. This is disappointing.
- The DVD drive failed after one month–the repair tech thought maybe the drive cable wasn’t completely seated at the factory, but he replaced it anyway since he had to take the whole machine a part to get to the drive. Seeing one of these machines taken completely apart is a marvel!
- The keyboard feels cheap. Since the DVD drive was replaced the bottom right part of the keyboard rattles and feels a little loose.
Overall I’ve been pleased though a good part of me is looking forward to three years from now when the warranty is up on I can go back to a Lenovo. There is something about the XPS that just feels cheap and fragile compared to sturdy construction of the Thinkpads I’ve owned. This impression comes mostly from the feel and sound of the keyboard and plastic part of the case. To its credit, this is the most well constructed Dell notebook I’ve owned.
My original objective was to keep Vista installed and dual boot. It is nice to have Windows around for the occasional required use and for watching movies. I ran into some problems shrinking the hard disk. The 320G drive came pre-formatted with all four partitions in use. This meant I couldn’t add an extended partition. There are probably faster ways to do this, but here is how I reclaimed space on the drive:
1. From Vista, selected, Start → Computer → Manage → Shrink. This reduced the size of the Vista partition by 50%, to 160G free, but it would not allow me to make it any smaller. My goal for the Vista partition was 40G.
2. I booted and ran Parted Magic to see if it could help. gparted
couldn’t read the partition because it said there are errors. It couldn’t fix them.
3. Rebooted into Vista and ran a full Windows file system scan. This fixed the errors.
4. Booted Parted Magic again and after about 30 minutes successfully resized the partition to the desired size. It appears that Vista and the installed software that came from Dell take up 20G of space which seems extreme compared to the footprint of a Linux install.
5. Rebooted into Vista to see what kind of damage I did. It churned for 1.5 hours (no joke) to “repair itself”… rebooting several times, rechecking the file system, etc. At the end everything worked fine.
6. Booted into the Fedora installer from a USB key. From the installer I removed the “Windows direct media” partition so that I could combine it with the other free space and designate it as an extended partition for Fedora.
7. Modified grub to boot Vista from the correct partition (one greater than what the installer guessed at).
Thanks to the post at http://equivocation.org/node/96 that helped me get through some of this.
I’m running Fedora 11 now and it runs pretty good on the XPS for the most part.
April 11, 2010 at 11:33 am
Yes, Dell normaly replaces batterys under warranty when they fail within one year.
January 20, 2010 at 7:34 am
THe HDMI output on my XPS works fine with both the Nouveau frivers and the Nvidia ones. (If you have an intel card, that is a moot point.
Currently driving a 26″ Iiyama monitor via hdmi.
Phil
January 20, 2010 at 7:16 am
@Björn-thanks for the suggestion. I will look into that. It sounds like Dell has replaced your batteries under warrant?
@philtrick-thanks for reminding me about the little remote. I’ve never used it and forgot all about it, but it could come in handy using the HDMI output on the XPS to the input on my TV. The HDMI output is definitely a plus which I previously overlooked–granted I have not confirmed yet that it works with Fedora.
I have to say that overall Fedora 12 is a much more pleasant experience on the XPS. Suspend is more reliable than Fedora 11. Hibernate is still a gamble whether it will return or not.
I’ve also just started experimenting with gnome-shell and like it A LOT. It adds a real sense of polish and a better feeling of “just works.” What I’m finding REALLY interesting is that as a result, my negative feelings about the hardware are not as strong as they were, though I am still annoyed about the battery life.
January 4, 2010 at 3:05 am
I have one too, running Fedora 12 which I installed in the beta phase.
I have a couple of quirks, such as a few strange messages on boot from device mapper, but other than that Fedora runs on this laptop really well.
I did see a decline on battery life, but running tuned on Fedora 12 has significantly extended my battery life. Other than that, the little remote in the express card slot works out of the box and is quite handy.
December 28, 2009 at 10:52 am
Check the remaining capacity of your battery from /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info . If it is far under the original capacity, I would call Dell for a replacement. I’m running my fourth battery in Latitude D630 – they never had full capacity vor longer than two month. I only experience this bad battery quality with Dell.