bluebottle

Vostro 1310 + Vista Business notes

I'm back with a Vostro 1310. Don't ask why. The important thing is that it's a good laptop. It would be even better, however, if it came with an Intel wireless chip.

My old 1310 had an Intel Wifi-N chip, but this new one has some sort of super obscure Broadcom chip that Ubuntu doesn't recognise out of the box. Because using ndiswrapper is almost always as much benefit as cost, I decided to skip Linux on this machine.

I'm running Vista (because it has better notebook features / integration) Business (because unlike Home, you get an RDP server, and it has less crap than Ultimate) 32-bit (because the laptop will never have more than 3gb of RAM).

Drivers are all on the Dell website, and all worked fine apart from these caveats:

• The synaptic touchpad drivers are useless! It doesn't even have the option to emulate a middle click, let alone enable a scroll zone. Grab the touchpad drivers for the Latitude D820 and you get better functionality. Thanks to this thread for discovering the solution for me.
• Although the wifi card is a Broadcom chip, Dell refer to it as a 'Dell Wireless 1505 Draft 802.11n' card. The driver is similarly named. On Vista, the driver installed the very useful Dell Wifi Utility, which is accessible from the Network & Sharing Center (bottom left). It doesn't try to take over the normal wireless connection functions from Windows either, which is nice.
• The fingerprint reader software does exactly what I want (fingerprint logon, stores prints for all my fingers, can be used as an app launcher once you are logged on). It also does a lot of stuff I don't want (saved passwords in IE, encrypted file storage), but it's possible to mostly hide it. The dell website distributes the drivers in a standalone pack without the utility, maybe one day I will look at bypassing the app for at least Windows logon.

Other random notes:

• Scores 4.1 on the Windows Experience Index. I can attest that the system is as responsive as my desktop - at least for the moment. I've left Superfetch enabled and in a few weeks will compare performance with and without.
• The Vostro's sound output levels are low. Just low enough to be slightly annoying when I want to listen to very loud music. The inbuilt speaker is also a joke, you have to use headphones.
• Winamp obeys the media keys up the top if you tell it to, but pressing the volume button freezes explorer.exe for me... I have to investigate this whole area more.
• 6-cell battery life = just under 3hrs of battery life with normal use (wifi, screen fully bright, music playing, surfing the net).

Overall, I'm happy with the laptop. Will post more if I think of more.

Comment (0)