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Dell Inspiron Line Gets New Specs, New Colors

Paul Lilly — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:58:37 -0500

In what Dell describes as "fashion meets function," the OEM has introduced an octuplet of color configurations for its refreshed Inspiron desktop line. That's more than what's found in some crayon boxes and includes Piano Black, Pure White, True Blue, Formula Red, Tangerine Orange, Spring Green, Plum Purple, and Promise Pink. The Promise Pink is a collaboration with Susan G. Komen for the Cure program to fight breast cancer - for every Promise Pink laptop or Mini Dell sells, it donates $5 to the cause.

The colorful Inspiron desktop line also includes a wide range of processor selections, such as Intel's Celeron, Core 2 Duo, and Core 2 Quad, and AMD's Sempron, Athlon, and Phenom X4 CPUs. Other configuration options include integrated Intel graphics or discrete ATI Radeon graphics, up to 8GB of memory, up to 750GB of storage on the slim tower and up to 1TB on the mini-tower, optional 19-in-1 media card reader, optional HDMI port, 6 USB 2.0 ports, and dual optical drive options.

Dell says its new slim and mini-tower Inspiron desktops debut today in China, with U.S. availability expected this spring starting at $299.

Image Credit: Dell via Engadget

Pick up a Netbook with SSD for Under $200

Paul Lilly — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 10:11:54 -0600

For the most part, netbooks have nipped at the heels of standard notebooks in terms of price, with some models running upwards for $500. Consumers have been willing to pay the premium for an ultra-portable, low-power PC, but weren't these things supposed to ultra-affordable, too?

Dell says yes, who now offers the Inspiron Mini 9n for just shy of two C-notes. On the outside, the Mini 9n comes with a glossy 8.9-inch LED display with a 1024x600 resolution and 'Obsidian Black' chassis. Underneath the hood sits a familiar Intel Atom N270 processor (1.6GHz, 512KB cache, 533MHz frontside bus), 512MB of DDR2-533, a 4GB SSD, Intel GMA 950 graphics, WiFi, and Ubuntu 8.04.1 pre-installed.

For a little more oomph, the standard Mini 9 runs $100 more and trades in Ubuntu for Windows XP, beefs up the RAM to 1GB, and doubles the SSD storage capacity to 8GB.

The customizable Insprion Mini 9n starts at $199.

Image Credit: Dell

Mini 10 Finally Moseys to Dell's Website

Paul Lilly — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:10:00 -0600

First unveiled last month during CES, there has been some question as to when Dell's Inspiron Mini 10 netbook would actually ship. Two weeks ago, Paul Synott, one of Dell's UK representatives, said the Mini 10 would be released on February 27th, and that's beginning to look a lot more likely now that Dell has updated its website with a Mini 10 product page.

According to Dell, the Inspiron Mini 10 will come configurable with either an Intel Z520 (1.33GHz, 512K L2 cache, 533MHz frontside bus) or Z530 (1.6GHz, 512K L2 cache, 533MHz frontside bus) Atom processor, 1GB of DDR2-533MHz RAM, Intel GMA 500 graphics, 120GB or 160GB hard drive, WiFi, 1.3MP webcam, 3-in-1 card reader, and a 3-cell battery. On the software front, the Mini 10 will come with Windows XP Home w/ SP3.

Externally, Dell says its Mini 10 will sport a keyboard 92 percent the size of a standard laptop, along with a 10.1-inch glossy LED display with a 16:9 aspect ratio (1024x576). There will be six color options and five artist designs to choose from.

Still no word on price.

Image Credit: Dell

Ask the Doctor: Windex Worries

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:00:00 -0600

A couple weeks ago I received a Dell Inspiron 6400 from a friend of mine. I was told that he used Windex directly on the screen, which dripped into the bottom of the LCD (between the screen and the housing). It now has a small, permanent “white fire” pattern on the bottom-center of the LCD screen. It appears not to be a physical effect, as I cannot see it when the laptop is off, but I can see it even when the backlight is turned off.
What should I do to fix my display?

—Jason Wesley

The Doctor has some bad news for you: Your situation is terminal. In this case, your laptop will require a screen transplant, as the Windex has irreversibly damaged the underlying layer of your panel. Even if you use Windex to clean a laptop’s screen—and the Doctor doesn’t recommend you do this—you need to resist the urge to spray it willy-nilly over the entire surface. Instead, spray a little bit on a cloth and use that to buff out your screen’s blemishes.

Ultimately, your screen will fare far better if you spritz a microfiber cloth with an alcohol-based LCD cleaner and give your screen a rub. You can make your own using a 50-50 mix of 70 percent isopropyl alcohol and distilled water. Or, if you’re feeling lazy, you can pick up a premixed screen cleaner from your computer store of choice.

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION Are flames shooting out of the back of your rig? First, grab a fire extinguisher and douse the flames. Once the pyrotechnic display has fizzled, email the doctor at doctor@maximumpc.co\ for advice on how to solve your technological woes.

First Impressions: My Ubuntu-based Dell

Robert Strohmeyer — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:55:34 -0500

When Dell first announced its line of preinstalled Linux PCs a couple of months ago, Maximum PC was eager to check them out. But, fearing the tough criticism for which Max PC is widely known, Dell flatly refused to send us a system to check out. We weren’t surprised, honestly, but we were a little annoyed. As it happens, though, I was in the market for a new laptop anyway, so I decided to plunk down my own personal credit card and buy a Dell Inspiron 1505N with Ubuntu preinstalled. Here’s what I think of it.

The 1505N arrived at my door yesterday, but my first impression of the machine came about a week or so earlier, when I noticed that Dell had discontinued it from their product line. I initially opted for the 1505N because it came with the option of an Nvidia GeForce Go 7300 graphics card, rather than just an integrated Intel card. Preferring 1680x1050 to 1440x900, and wanting to play a little WoW from the road, I chose the 1505N over the 1420N almost exclusively for its better graphics hardware. And I’m glad I bought when I did, because Dell took the system out of its Ubuntu product line just days after I placed my order.

Unpacking the notebook from its shipping carton revealed very little out of the ordinary, save a single Ubuntu disc sitting in the bottom. The disc is mostly a formality, as the OS is not only preinstalled on the hard drive, but also sits in reserve on a restore partition just in case I do something foolish like ‘sudo rm -Rf /*’ or whatever. This restore partition is the sort of thing I would have cared about back when I was a net admin, but I’ll most likely repartition the entire drive when it comes time to install Gutsy Gibbon or some other distro in the future. All of the drivers are available in the Ubuntu repositories anyway, so there’s little reason to tie up the disk space.

Within about 30 seconds, I had the system out of its box, plugged in, and booting on my coffee table. The 2GHz Intel T7200 CPU and 7200rpm Seagate hard drive made for a quick boot, so within another 40 seconds I was greeted by the Ubuntu configuration dialog, which prompted me to choose my language and keyboard layout, set my time zone, and set up a username and password. All in all, the whole process took about two minutes.

I was initially disheartened to notice that my audio card and GPU weren’t working out of the box. I had expected to have to enable the GeForce 7300’s proprietary driver using the Restricted Drivers Manager, but it simply wouldn’t enable until after I downloaded 84 updates, which took another few minutes. Fortunately, the Intel wireless card worked perfectly right away, so I just surfed the Web for a few minutes while all the updates downloaded and installed. After another quick reboot, the sound worked fine and I was able to enable the Nvidia driver. So the actual time from opening the carton to starting real work was about 10 minutes total. That’s a darn sight better than the usual process of wiping out a Windows partition, installing Ubuntu, and then configuring the drivers, which normally takes me about half an hour on my old notebook. And as annoying as it is to have any piece of hardware not instantly jump into action on the first boot, even my grandmother could have breezed through this initial setup process quickly.

Once the system was up and running, I enabled Desktop Effects to see a little eye candy. Ubuntu’s default Desktop Effects consist of a stripped down Compiz Fusion with just Wobble and Cube enabled. I wanted the whole shebang, so I ended up uninstalling Desktop Effects and installing the full version of Compiz Fusion, which took about five minutes. Then I spent another half hour screwing around with different themes, just for the hell of it, until I settled on something I liked. None of this was necessary, really, but what’s the point of having a new toy if you’re not going to play with it? To that end, once I had my desktop interface all customized out, I popped in Brazil on DVD and played with the notebook’s front-mounted media controls.

All things considered, the Dell Inspiron 1505N is a competent—albeit discontinued—notebook that strikes a healthy balance between business and entertainment (you know, busitainment). Dell’s preinstallation fell short of my expectations by delivering a system that wasn’t quite fully functional the moment I booted it up, but the machine basically fixed itself with the first round of automated software updates. But the real question to answer here is whether I’d recommend a preinstalled Ubuntu system like this to you, the reader. So here goes:

If you’re an experienced Linux user who knows how to select hardware appropriately, there’s no supremely compelling reason to choose one of these Dells over another system you like more. After all, you’re not likely to go looking for support from the manufacturer unless your hardware is legitimately defective, in which case the preinstallation wouldn’t help you much anyway. But if you’re relatively new to Linux, or just don’t feel like hassling with setting up all your drivers—which can be a pain even for those who’ve done a hell of a lot of it—then Dell’s Ubuntu systems are worth a look. For my own part, I’m pleased enough with the system. It’s got plenty of power for the limited gaming I do, and now that it’s up and running it’s robust and immensely stable. Could I have found another laptop with all the same components and installed Ubuntu myself for about the same price (and without waiting two weeks for it to arrive)? Sure. But I’m just as happy that I didn’t have to.

SIDE NOTE: I’m damned glad Dell is going to be selling some systems through retail channels in the coming year, because for someone (like me) who’s into instant gratification, it just sucks waiting around for a new PC to arrive.