Dell 640m

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal

Woohoo!! Got my Dell 640m on Tuesday, 26th. It was kinda quick too, considering I placed the order on 20th (last Wednesday) night. And as mentioned in my previous post, I upgraded the processor to the highest possible configuration: Core 2 Duo T7200. The great thing about Core 2 Duo (over Core Duo) is that it has SpeedStep. Shame on me: I discovered it after I got the laptop; I showed my friend my processor spec and found that it was at 998 MHz.

My 640m came with MediaDirect installed. That damned thing took up around 6GB of precious hard disk space (2GB + 4GB free partition that I’m guessing is for MediaDirect). Hey, I only have 80GB, and that’s not a lot today.. so what did I do with a brand new Dell? Format it.. yeah, mainly coz I needed to re-partition it to my liking :p Anyway, it was a friggin’ rush.. the driver installation was a pain in the ass too.. I had to click each of them one by one, extract them to disk, before installing.. argh!

I installed SiSoftware Sandra, and it revealed that the hard disk was from Hitachi! Great news.. I heard Hitachi hard disks were good ;-) Funny thing though, is that the memory module was from a manufacturer called “Nanya”. Never heard of it before.. doesn’t matter.. will change to a Kingston 1GB DDR2-663 RAM next week :p

So far, the Dell’s been great. Some say Compaqs and HPs look nicer, but I think the Dell isn’t that bad either. It’s got a card reader, so I don’t have to plug in my camera via USB all the time.. but then again, almost all laptops have a card reader now.. Most important of all, it’s got all “Insert”, “Delete”, “Home” and “End” keys in easy reach. Some dumb ass laptops (like those from Toshiba) requires to you press Fn + something to go “Home” or “End”. It’s real irritating when programming.. The screen is pretty nice, but it’s viewing angle sucks hard..

Ah, and I love the multimedia buttons at the front too.. Foobar can also be configured to receive commands from the multimedia keys.. good! Now I don’t have to right click on the system tray icon and select “Random” to skip a song ;-) Oh, the buttons glow blue when pressed too..

Take a closer look at the picture on top.. I slid two rubbers/erasers (the kind I bought for 10 sen as a kid) under it to raise the front up by 1cm or so.. why? To mimic Microsoft’s Natural Egonomic Keyboard 4000.. seriously, it does feel pretty comfortable.. I might need to tilt it a little higher up though..

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Permalink | December 28th, 2006

3 Responses to “Dell 640m”

  1. Regina Says:
    December 29th, 2006 at 9:25 am

    Luckily my Toshiba laptop has independent Home and End key. No need to press Fn key…

  2. bckk Says:
    December 29th, 2006 at 11:30 pm

    That’s really a cool laptop.
    how many years of warranty of this laptop?
    RM38XX if i am not wrong from ur previous post,it is really quite worth it

  3. Jonathan Ng Says:
    December 30th, 2006 at 10:26 am

    Yeah, RM 3838 + RM 180 for year 2-3 collect and return warranty. So it’s RM 4018. Am selling off the 512 ram for a ddr667 1GB stick, so the total should be RM 4238.

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