A few weeks ago I wrote a review of my Dell Studio 15 purchase on 2008‒07‒22 and submitted it to Dell.com’s product feedback section. My review is transcribed (the content is verbatim) here:
Praise:
• Good specs for the price
• Small size for the price
• Excellent screen quality
• Slot-loading optical drive (much safer!) with eject button
• Four USB ports is better than two 
• Webcam worked out-of-the-box with Fedora 9
• I rarely see the CPU over 60℃
Criticism:
• Poor battery life (and 100 charge-recharge cycles?!); lasts about 1½ hours with the CPU limited to 1Ghz
• Poor thermal loss; battery gets drained quickly when the CPU’s running hot
• The Mobility graphics cards have limited OpenGL support
• The plastic rim is coming off! I’m terrified of what it’ll be like in a year
• (For Linux users) Configuration only supports Broadcom-based Dell wireless cards, which don’t have open source drivers, and Broadcom’s proprietary drivers work poorly with ndiswrapper²
• Speaker quality is lower than the average laptop’s
• (For Linux users) Audio device drivers are proprietary—I’ve been unable to use headphones in Linux³
• Can’t turn off tap-click or the keyboard driver’s unusual sticky-key like feature
• Extremely difficult to disassemble/replace components even for a laptop
Wrap-up:
Dell is talking about shipping Studios with Ubuntu, and the Linux-specific issues should be fixed soon. I should’ve bought an XPS and wouldn’t recommend the Studio 15 to Linux users until Broadcom and Intel finish breaking their ties with accepting Microsoft’s money to deliberately decrease cross-OS compatability. Right now I’d recommend it to Windows users and Linux users who don’t mind the headphones and wireless issues. Chances are I’ll excitedly adveratize it to Linux users in a few months.
For cofiguration, I’d generally recommend choosing the 85Wh battery, a non-integrated graphics card, and a 7200RPM hard drive if it’s still cheap.
Notes:
¹ When I bought it on 2008-07-22, the only hard drive option with 7200RPM was 200USD more. Since going from my 5400RPM 320GB hard drive to the 7200RPM 200GB is now 75USD, I recommend doing so
² Broadcom is currently developing open source drivers that should be released soon: http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2008/10/03/linux-driver-available-for-dell-wireless-cards.aspx
³ The ALSA and Linux Kernel developers are working on fixing this
How I Use It:
• Computationally-intensive programming.
• Testing encryption algorithms and network/security systems
• 3D modelling and animation with Blender 3D.
• Gaming (with Direct X- and OpenGL- based graphics)
Here’s the catch: either I’m worse at finding possessions of mine—in such case not only physical—than I previously thought, or my review was removed or hidden; it’s not there. I’m wondering if it was tagged as “not helpful” (likely because it describes Linux-only issues which would probably be helpful to less than 1% of the readers) enough that it was hidden. Then again, the submission also allocates—with description indicating its private nature—a small input field for comment on the website, in which I entered the following:
Bashing of Website Layout:
Completely non-standards-compliant. I previously thought getting HTML 4.0 to fail the W3C test was impossible. Difficult to navigate and read in any browser I’ve tried (Firefox 3, Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6, Konqueror for KDE 4.1.1, and Seamonkey). Layout is consistently terrible and consistently different across every page! The logo appears in front of my drop-down navigation. Images are larger and more prominent in places where they shouldn’t be. Otherwise web browsing-competent new users can’t figure it out (I’ve tried it ☺). An overhaul seems fully appropriate. Among unmentioned other positive aspects (I’m a negative person), I’m glad the prices are easy to find.
Given the lawsuits filed and won against Dell, I cannot contain my conspiracy theory. Or maybe I just cannot find it.
