September 23, 2010 Personal
So I finally bought high performance machine for my blogging :).
I probably should mention that I do NOT have desktop computer located somewhere at home*. I heard that many people like to have those at home and one small laptop for travel or whatever else. I’m supporter of the idea that nowadays the gap between desktop computers and laptops is much much smaller and I do not see any reason why I should use few computers and play around synchronizing them, administrating, etc. I have one entry point for everything and I like this.
Why I was not satisfied with my previous laptop?
Top number one reason is screen resolution! I often like to remotely connect to my work machine. But resolution there is much higher than my old (1280×800) so it was unpleasant to work that way. Also having a lot of applications opened doesn’t work very well.
Second reason is performance. I simply wanted to be able to open few VS2010 instances without any delays.
Third and also valuable reason is that I as a kid wanted a new toy to play with.
Comparison of Dell Studio 1535 and Dell Studio XPS 1647
So here is comparison of what I had and what I have now:
|
Dell Studio 1535  |
Dell Studio XPS 1647  |
| Processor Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5850 2.16GHz |
Processor Intel® Core™ i7-620M Processor 2.66GHz (3.33GHz Turbo Mode, 4MB Cache) |
| Display LCD(1280×800) |
LCD Panel Edge-to-Edge FHD Widescreen 15.6 inch WLED LCD (1920×1080) W/2.0 MP |
| CD ROM/DVD ROM DVD Super Multi |
CD ROM/DVD ROM 8X Slot Load CD/DVD Burner (Dual Layer DVD+/-R Drive) |
| Memory 2GB DDR2-667 |
Memory 4GB Shared Dual Channel DDR3 at 1333MHz |
| Hard Drive 320GB 5400 |
Hard Drive |
| Video Card
ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 3450 |
Video Card ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5730 – 1GB |
| Sound High Definition Audio |
Sound High Definition Audio 2.0 with SRS Premium Sound |
| Wireless Dell Wireless 1397 WLAN Mini-Card |
Wireless Intel® 5300 WLAN Wireless-N (3×3) Mini Card |
| Battery 56 Whr Lithium Ion Battery (6 cell) |
Battery 85 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery |
Windows Experience Comparison
Dell Studio 1535:
Dell Studio XPS 1647:
So looking at the pictures above it is seen that bottleneck of my new laptop is hard disk and memory speed. This means that when something will require accessing hard disk (loading something into memory, working with svn, etc) I will not gain performance. Sadly, but I can do nothing about this.
My personal comparison
Wow! That is exactly what I wanted. This laptop is just sexy. You cannot imagine how everything is loading quickly. Everything is flying.
Appearance is amazing. Perfect for those guys who like style toys. It has genuine leather accents at the edge, which looks very cute.
I do see much more with full HD screen. Yeah, some fonts are very tiny, especially when you are taking a look on the 8pt fonts on the screen of resolution 1920×1080 but with the same physical size as screen 1280×800 difference is evident. I do not have any complains about my eye vision so this is something I even like. If that could be the problem for you, you can easily increase font sizes and have much smoother looking symbols. And very interesting fact I opened some site, and they have text alignment to the left. Of course this is bad idea, but what is interesting I was able to see many lines of “You have perfect monitor” on the most right :)
Also I experienced that one of old games that I used to play now easily can be switched to higher resolution, so all textures are very smooth.
Getting everything up and running
You know what is the sad about this? – I got Home Premium version of Windows 7 and I’m not completely sure if this is something that is enough for software developer.
Copying everything from was as much as easy as copying from logical disk D to disk E. I plugged Ethernet crossover cable into both of them and ensured that they have different IP addresses and that’s it! High speed computer-to-computer network is ready.
At the moment I feel that movement to brand new computer happened momentarily without any stress for me.
Latest cents
Having a good quality computer for person who is interested in developing software is very important. So if you are now considering of buying something expensive – do not hesitate, because you deserve it. (If you are not Ukrainian – laptop which costs 1500$ is near average software developer month salary (2-6 years of experience).)
(*) Ok, I have it, but I gave up using it.
9 comments
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You can replace your hard drive with faster one:) I think the next article can be interesting to read for you
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/revisiting-solid-state-hard-drives.html
Dmytro, for now SSD is too expensive for me and capacity isn't enough. I like to have 500Gb. So I have to wait…
thanks for pointing on that blog post!
Congratulations, hope you both will have a really good time together =)
Restuta, he-he! Of course! I already had couple of nights.
If you read those article to the end, you will find about hybrid drives that are cheaper but have better performance than usual ones;)
performance of this laptop is really very good, my emachines looks like netbook in compare with this one)
Ihor, till now I did not feel any of performance drawbacks! I ran another OS on virtual machine and at the same time played game which even did not work on one of my desktop machines with 256Mb G-Force video card. I have to try something special to see the limits of this monster!
Very informative and well written post! Quite interesting and nice topic chosen for the post.
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Very informative and worthy post. Thanks for the sharing such a precious updates with us.
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