GearWERKZ TechBlog

I am on self-imposed punishment; what some of my more suburban reared friends refer to as restriction. I went and did something that I arguably should not have: bought a Dell XPS M1330. Point is, I am on my third day of waiting for the phone call to tell me that they are ready to re-image my PC at work. So I decided to do something about it.

Follow up:

But I am not without buyer’s remorse. So the punishment is extreme. No DVDs (or other purchased video media), video games, music (downloads or CDs), or gadgets until I put the money back into savings that I dipped into to buy the 1330. This will blow, especially with all of the good game titles coming out this holiday season. But such is the price we who are lovers of gadgets pay.

The M1330 is pretty great. It is the PRODUCT RED version sold at Best Buy. So it has a pre-selected processor; models on the Dell website allow you to scale the processor upwards. And apparently there are different LCDs sold depending on which chain you buy them through. The Dell website version features a backlit LED display, while the one in the store has a fluorescent lighted LCD. Not a big deal to me. I am not going to be playing a ton of games or watching a ton of video on this machine. And for the about $600 less that it sells for in Best Buy vice its website counterpart, I am willing to take a few downgrades. The key advantages are that it puts me in a 13” form factor (finally, to be able to work on the plane again), has 4GB of RAM and a 64-bit Operating System, and a 320GB Hard Drive…plenty of room for my iTunes Archive with no portable external hard drive required. Now, to see how long it lasts.

I’ve been working on the Samsung Q1 Ultra and now the Toshiba M305-S4819 this week. Between both, I started and then completed a slight update to the main site (www.gearwerkz.net), mainly posting new links for titles being tracked on the GameWatch. While I use Windows Media Player on both of those machines, I have had to re-set my PCs that are authorized on my iTunes account as part of getting the M1330 up and running. Somehow, I wound up with 5 machines authorized, one of which I could not account for. Fortunately, I had not used my once per year opportunity to Deauthorize All Computers. Once that was done, I authorized one desktop, the GatewayFX, the MacBook Pro and MacBook, and the XPS M1330. I figure that I can roll authorizations back and forth between the two desktops, since I should never need to have them both authorized at the same time.

Speaking of MacBooks, I had a chance to play with one of the newly updated models at Best Buy when I went to buy the M1330. The screens on the new MacBooks are pretty nifty. Maybe not as good as my current (early-2008 revision) MacBook Pro, but certainly better than my MacBook (mid-2007 rev). Whereas my MacBook features a display that I do not like the concept of working on for days at a time, I do not think I would have any issues with the newly updated, aluminum-clad MacBook. I briefly considering grabbing one instead of the XPS M1330, but begged off for a few reasons: too conspicuous, hard drive was half the size of the 1330, would have to run BootCamp in order to use for work projects, the mid-level model was slightly more expensive than the 1330, and I am 7 months from the minimum 2 years use of the current MacBook at which point I can consider upgrading it. But it was fun to think it over.

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