New XPS1330

So my birthday was today. And as my usual habit I decided to buy myself a birthday present. In this case a Dell XPS M1330 (PRODUCT) RED.

But of course it wasn't just red it came fully loaded. I ordered the new Penryn T9500 with 6mb L2 cache running at 2.6. I ordered this bad boy with 1 gig of ram and ordered some high performance 4 gig memory duh. But it doesn't stop there I bought it with the LED - backlit 13.3" UltraSharp WXGA display with TrueLife and built-in web cam. Of course I just couldn't resist trying out solid state drives. Yup this bad boy has 60 GB of solid state storage. For networking it has 10/100 wired, Intel 802.11N and a 3g cell modem. It not just fast but wickedly fast. And battery life awesome I ran doing my installs on a 9 cell battery all afternoon and early evening spinning CDs and maximum performance. It lasted over 5 hours. I suspect with normal usage my 6 cell will last that long or longer.

One concern I had was some developers complaining that SSD negatively impact performance compiling programs. I can tell you right now that is just not true. My compiles went down 40% or more against my benchmark machine. Network access was wickedly fast as well. I downloaded 64-bit Vista at a whooping 1mbs vs getting only 1/2 that speed from my other machines.

This baby is not just incrementally fast but revolutionary in performance gains and battery life. My only complaint is once I reloaded my XPS with 64-bit Vista, Office 2008, VS2005 and VS2008, etc I only had 9.5 GB free. Maybe I should fall back to a slim XP or Linux. So much to do so much more time to do it in.

Comments

[Fred]

Hello!

I just found your blog since I was looking for info on the XPS 1330 with a SSD. I am glad that it is really fast, and I guess I will order one as well.
Thanks for the feedback!

Btw, maybe you should try to trim Vista of some of its unnecessary features. Well, that's what I will do when I have it since disk space is indeed scarce with a SSD.

[Peter B]

Hey Rabi!! Sorry I missed your birthday - then again, I've missed a lot of stuff in relatively recent history. Any way, I'd say I hope it was fun, but knowing you and hearing about your new "toy", it had to be, in Rabi-sort of way.