Dell 6400 - update

November 16, 2006 · Filed Under Technology and Gadgets · Comment

I’ve had my new Dell 6400 laptop for a couple of months now and I thought I would write a bit about my impressions so far.

The Good

It’s fast - fires up and is ready to go pretty quickly. It also opens programs and saves stuff nice and rapidly.

It’s built well - the keyboard is not mushy, which cannot be said for many sub-thousand Euro laptops on the market. Overall it feels quite robust.

The screen is impressive - it’s bright clear and easy to ready, and despite some people’s comments the shiny screen does not cause me glare problems. The screen is big enough to run presentations to small groups directly without having to hook up to an overhead projector.

It’s quite light - the unit is lighter than my smaller screened Sony Viao and even the power supply is smaller too, so it has turned out to be much more portable than I was expecting.

The battery lasts ages - for the moment the battery life is impressive, unlike my old Sony which could manage 2 hours when new, this beast seems to keep on running for 5 odd hours making it a real portable computer.

The CPU runs cool - around 26°C on average, although I have not been running anything that requires much CPU horsepower yet.

The Bad

It’s locked up a few times - mainly mysterious memory parity errors, but once no error message was given and I just had to switch the thing off and restart it. I don’t know what caused the crash though, which worries me a little. Could have been a hot hard disk - see below.

The temperature of the hard drive - I ordered a 7200 rpm 100gb unit and I think I went over the top. The hard drive’s specs indicate that the maximum operating temperature is 55°C - and I see between 47 and 50°C. This is OK in winter, but I’m worried about summer. I make regular back-ups just to be on the safe side.

Niggles

The wi-fi can be a bit temperamental - it does not drop the signal much but sometimes after re-starting from standby I do not get a signal immediately and have to mess around with re-setting the wi-fi to get back on-line. On balance though it is about the same as my Sony in this respect, although the Sony did not have built in wi-fi.

The speaker/mic connectors are both black so I cannot remember which is which and cannot see them easily either.

It would have been nice to have had more USB ports on the sides - the two on the back are in the middle of the back panel and are a little difficult to reach without, poor little me, having to stand up. This really is a minor niggle, I know.

Overall

I am pleased with the thing and it has enabled me to speed up my work a little, mainly because I do not have to hand around waiting for it to save stuff. In order to speed up my wi-fi connection to the WWW I had to tweak a few settings both system-wise and within FireFox - but as a result it loads many web pages, except ad laden CNET, very quickly.

I would recommend Dell IT equipment to others, especially if they know what they want and like the idea of being able to create the spec they need/want. This is a great feature of Dell’s on-line service. It would be nice to be able to see the products ‘in the flesh’ though, although I am probably rather old fashioned in that I like to see what I am buying generally.

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Confusion reigns

November 16, 2006 · Filed Under Italian politics · Comment

Just what Prodi and his government are up to is anyone’s guess at the moment. Reforms, or rather changes, are being discussed right left and centre, but the nature of all the proposals seems to change from one day to the next. Proposals for new taxes or changes to existing taxes seem to come and go. It all smells of pre-Berlusco Italian government, that is one man is trying to keep all and sundry happy, but failing (You have to hand it to Berlusco - at least he managed to keep one government in power for a whole 5 years - a real record in post war Italian politics - I think Guinness have written it into their famous book and I would dearly love to know just how he did it, or maybe I wouldn’t!!) . All the little factions which make up the current government cannot agree on anything. And so, as is the way here, enter the no-confidence vote. This vote has traditionally brought down dilatory and ineffectual Italian governments countless times since WWII. The trouble is one dilatory and ineffectual Italian government is usually replaced by yet another. Rinse and repeat. With Prodi back in the chair Italian politics seems to have gone back to its usual old tricks - revolving door government. This country could do with a bi or tri-party system so at least everyone could be forced to tow the party line and actually get something done. This, however, would be far too simple and totally goes against the Italian propensity for complexity. Many Italian managers still believe that KISS was some old US ‘hard’ rock band, I suspect. Many Italian politicians, on the other hand, would not even know that KISS was a US rock band…..

Now we have Alitalia and the national railway system in dire straits. How on earth they were allowed to get into such a state is beyond me, I mean, they are effectively state enterprises, so what has the state been doing? Not keeping an eye on things, that would seem evident. A ‘closing my eyes and hoping for the best’ style of management seems to have been in the business plan. Except someone kept his eyes closed for too long. Have you ever played the share market? If you have you will know that when the prices go down you have two possible courses of action - sell as fast as you can and cut your losses, or hold on in there in the hope that the price will recover, only, more often it does not, at least not in the short term. Well, this would seem to have been Alitalia and the railways bosses tactics, er possibly.

This country has phenomenal potential and has gots lots of good brains, but it does not seem to be able to exploit either - with the possible exception of the brain power being employed to creatively funnel money off into off-shore accounts, that is. You cannot really blame them seeing as so much public money is wasted or not accounted for. I suppose the theory is the less you give them, the less the governments can waste, thereby ensuring that what does enter state coffers is spent more wisely. A nice theory, but the government is becoming better at collecting taxes. Craxi did a great job of keeping lots of public money to himself, or so it would seem and letting the government have more money could be quite a dangerous move, unless some new and honest faces appear on the scene, fast.

Beppe Grillo is having a field day at the moment - he seems to have enough material to write around two daily posts on what is not going right. This is a little worrying.

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