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I hate it with a vengeance. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful to my current employer for providing me with a notebook to use since I butchered my last one[1], but that doesn’t change the fact that I hate the guts of the thing. Don’t buy one. Seriously.

It began with the confusion I felt the first time I turned it on: there’s a big, round, invitingly large power button at the top, with an array of LEDs nearby, and I happily pressed the big button to see my new worktoy in action. Except none of the LEDs lit up, and the device didn’t seem to do anything. I press the button again. Nothing. And again. Nothing.

Closer inspection revealed that the three LEDs, at least one of which I had mistaken for a power LED, were actually the keyboard’s NumLock, Caps lock and Scroll lock LEDs. The actual power LEDs are at the front of the device, conveniently located out of sight when you’re interacting with the power button. And yes, I had turned the device on properly at the first press.

I hesitate to think about the design choice that was made to put those LEDs there, because they are confusing and annoying. Annoying, because if you try to watch a movie on the laptop in a darkened room, you’ll constantly see a bright green LED just below the image. And in my case, also a flickering orange light… my battery light is busted and keeps indicating the battery is empty — even if I’m plugged into a wall socket. Oh plus, there’s another button there whose function I haven’t figured out yet. Pressing it does absolutely nothing…

The Inspiron 1100’s LED anatomy:

As long as we are on the subject of hardware design, I think the top lid deserves mention. It feels like it can break off at any moment just by handling it. To say it’s wobbly is just not doing it justice. As my device is second-hand, I don’t know if it has always been this way, but I strongly suspect it has. It’s like the lid is pretty tight if you flip it open or closed, but then has some added wobble room of a few centimeters, just to give you the impression the thing will fall apart if you touch it the wrong way. Which I imagine is probably true…

Ah, and who can rant about a notebook without forgetting the keyboard? Notebook keyboards are horrible by default, so there’s not much that needs to be said. Yes, the keys themselves are fine (although they require at least twice as much pressure as my previous notebook)… it’s just… the layout is simply abysmal. Of course that’s par for the course on notebooks. It seems just about every notebook manufacturer feels the need to reinvent the key layout, merrily moving around commonly required editing keys like Home, PgUp and Down, End and Delete. For me, the biggest annoyances with the Inspiron:

• Who needs the Windows and Context keys on the lower row? We’ll move them to the top right!
• You know the Delete key that used to be there? Now there’s room for that on the lower row, where it never ever ever ought to be!
• And just for good measure, we’ll also move the tilde/backquote (~`) key, traditionally found left of the number keys, to the top right. Will we put another key in its place? Nah, we’ll just leave the space half-empty.

So far I’ve covered the front, but here’s another interesting design desicision for you: we’ll put the air vent on the bottom! That’s right. You can take this lap-top you’ve just bought, but if you go ahead and put it on your lap, you pretty much get the top of them burned. I know my previous laptop was pretty hot to have on my lap, but this one is blowing hot air onto my legs! (We’ll I’m told the hole there is for sucking in cool air, but I really can’t tell the difference, except the effect it is having on my thighs, and it’s not a good one).

On to peripherals: there’s not much I expect from a laptop in that area. Except this: a PS/2 port! Instead of a regular PS/2 port, there’s two USB connectors and that’s it. Yes, I realize that in the year 2000, we will all go to our jobs in flying hovercars and all peripheral devices will use USB, but right now, there’s still a whole lot of PS/2 keyboards and mice lying around. Not offering support for them is just cheap. The keyboards I like best are the cheap, plastic, standard PS/2 keyboards. Forget hooking them up: right now I’m typing on a shitty Trust Slimline keyboard, that also insists a ridicilous key layout (because let’s face facts: who would want any key where they can find them blindly?). And don’t forget: if you’ve hooked up a keyboard and a mouse, you can forget another USB device like a memory stick. Granted, the keyboard problem is more one of my workplace than one of the laptop itself… but it annoys me nonetheless.

But there’s good news! It has a built-in modem, for all your 56k pleasure! I guess it must have slipped by the banish antiquated standards committee. Needless to say, I haven’t used it once.

I guess that pretty much covers the hardware on the outside. On to the juicy center!

The Inspiron 1100 is powered by a 2.4GHz Pentium. Rather than feeling “Holy jeepers Batman!”-fast, it feels okay. I guess being on a notebook will do that to a 2+GHz CPU. On the other hand, there’s the point of diminishing returns: from a certain point, if you’re not doing heavy calculations, you won’t notice the difference in speed from just using Windows.

I do suspect some kind of a bus problem though. Don’t call me on the specifics, because I’m not much of a hardware man, but CPU usage increases extremely when downloading files over a network connection: downloading files from an FTP server with ~500KB/s takes 70% CPU. I haven’t done enough testing to determine whether the CPU usage stems from the network card or the harddisk, but fact remaings that this is extremely annoying. Continuing to work with a download in the background becomes a chore because of sluggish response. However, I seem to recall my old laptop had the same problem, so it may just have something to do with the inherent architecture of a notebook.

And last but not least, there’s the video card, an Intel 82845G. The funny thing is that on Intel’s site, it’s not listed under “Laptop graphics controller”… instead it’s filed under “Desktop graphics controller”. Oh Dell, what have you been up to?

It’s an Intel Extreme Graphics card, who — as you may know — are far from. I’d say it’s decidedly un-Extreme. On the other hand, perhaps they meant to say Extremely Slow. You can pretty much forget playing games on this thing, because although the notebook advertises to have a pretty beefy CPU, the graphics card pretty much cancels out any performance you might have hoped to gain.

Too bad, but that’s not the worst of it. One of the great things about working on a laptop is that it’s a breeze to get multi-monitor setups working. All you need is an spare monitor and *bam*, double the desktop, double the fun! Right? Nope, not on the Inspiron. As per Intel’s site:

Multi-monitor is supported on most Intel® 82845G graphics controller-based systems using PCI video cards to support additional monitors. With the latest Intel® Extreme Graphics Drivers for the Intel 82845G graphics controller, the integrated video can be either the primary or the secondary display adapter. Multi display is not possible with the onboard display and an AGP add-in card (the AGP card will disable the onboard graphics).

That’s right. You’re on a laptop, you could have the easiest dual-head setup possible, just plug in a monitor and go, but you can’t because of a shitty video card. So what is the VGA ext connector good for? Clone display. Excuse me while I go contain my excitement.

Actually, come to think of it: I suppose the above excerpt reads something different than I thought it did. But that doesn’t change the fact that I still can’t use the “extend desktop” feature. So the verdict stands, and the card is still shitty.

But wait, I’m not done yet! Here’s another interesting tidbit about the video card: if you close the lid of the laptop, and reopen it, the video card gets reinitialized! That’s right. I can’t imagine why, but it really does that. It’s only really a problem with mplayer: I guess from the way it works, it depends on some kind of open connection with the video driver. In any case, if mplayer is running, and I close and reopen the lid, mplayer crashes as the video card reinitializes (I make it a point to disable the “on lid close go to standby” option). And it’s not like the video card goes down when the lid closes, and comes back up when the lid is reopened; no, that would have been too logical. In fact, it happens a good second after I’ve opened the lid, and it goes something like this:

1. Close lid
2. Backlight switches off
3. mplayer keeps running
4. Open lid
5. Backlight comes on
6. mplayer still running
7. SCREEN GOES BLACK
8. Screen comes back on
9. mplayer kicks the bucket

Is this something that occurs in daily life? It does for me: see, I have a fairly long commute to work (50 minutes by train, then 20 minutes by bus), and I like to pass the time by watching a movie or TV show. When I have to transfer between train and bus, I like to just close the lid and put the laptop in my bag, go to the bus, take the laptop out and continue watching — saves me the hassle and the time of shutdown/startup, and again startup when I arrive at my workplace. Except each time I do this, my media player crashes and burns because of the stupid behaviour of the video card. I’d really like to see some justification for this behaviour, because it seems completely pointless to me. Just one more factor in my hatred of the Inspiron 1100…

I believe that pretty much covers my beefs with this inane piece of technology. Each one of them may not be a big problem, but they add up and the total picure is that this is just not a well thought-out machine. And news is not all bad on the Dell front. I have some friends claiming to be very satisfied with their Dell laptops. I guess it’s just my luck.

Despite this all, is there nothing good to say about the Dell Inspiron 1100? Oh sure… it performs its job adequately, and judging from the various lids on the bottom, maintenance of the thing will be pretty easy (something I’m not surprised of, coming from Dell).

It’s just, bitching is a lot more fun …

Peace out y’all!

Footnotes:

[1] A trusty Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook C. Yeah it was old and slow, but sturdy and reliable! Except it doesn’t survive coffee spills and it certainly doesn’t survive dropping it on the floor from 2 meters…