The Picture above is Half-Life2 a notoriously resource heavy game.

If you read my blog you will know I have a nice shiny new Dell XPS M1210

I wanted to test my new laptop and one of the best ways to stress a system out is to play 3d style games on it.

The good news the M1210 is a great little performer. I am very impressed at what you can get a Nvidia Gforce 7400 to do.

Anyway I grabbed a couple of the newest game demos, I got one specifically Crashday from Atari, you drive about and crash into things. (yes I am a grown up, honest)

The game was quite fun, I even added it to my wish list at Amazon.

I uninstalled the demo. But I found the games copy protection mechanism/DRM/Rootkit/Whatever you want to call it, stayed on my system and had to be manually removed.

It was a software process called ua7service.exe

This involved stopping the software service, then deleting the ua7service.exe at the command prompt.

I am not impressed and on principle wont be purchasing the game and double checking something as simple as a game demo wont be able to cripple my system.

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I heard the Core Duo had some new instructions to speed up multimedia, so I did a quick test.

The Test: Ripping a 54min Audio CD to iTunes @ 192k Mp3

For comparison I tested the Dell Latitude X300 which had a 24 speed CD Drive against the M1210’s DVD+RW, which for these tests was treated as a 24 speed CD Drive.

X300 took 8m4s
M1210 took 3m54s

Thats a fantastic improvement.

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A 3d Rotating Desktop on a Aero Glass Desktop

The installation of Windows Vista and Office2007 on the Dell XPS M1210 has been completed.

Gotcha’s

To Date there is no official Nvidia Geforce Go 7400 Vista Video Drivers. You can use the latest XP Drivers to get video support, but no Aero Glass.

To get Aero Glass working you have to install a modified driver that someone tweaked to get the Glass to work. But it does work and looks very pretty.

Windows Vista Perf (Performance)

Boy this needs to get better. I have installed Vista on a:-

3ghz, 1gb Ram – ATI Radeon 128mb 9800 Pro
Core Duo 2.0Ghz, 1gb Ram Nvidia Geforce Go 7400 256mb

Both these machines are pretty powerful, but lumber under Windows Vista Beta 2.

I know its Beta and Microsoft will work on the Perf near the end of development, but my tip is if your getting a PC between now and when Vista ships or plan to use Vista in the coming years (2007-2010), get a really powerful one.

Start by getting a PC that is “Vista Capable”.

This also means you may have issues if you want to take your Pentium 4 2.0ghz , 512mb class machines and upgrade them to this platform. Even if the perf gets 1/3 better its not going to be pretty.

So I have the laptop of tomorrow (Vista/Office2007) It looks the part.

Now I have 180 days head start on the next generation of technology.

Why is it important to get in now for people like me? Well come June 2007 and a client wants to refresh those 5 year old XP Pro Machines, I will know exactly what I am getting myself and the client into.

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No one is more surpised than me that the laptop I ordered at 13:30 on Tuesday arrived 13:30 on Thursday.

First Impressions are good. But Dell have loaded about 20 extra software bits that I dont want so I had to de-leech the system.

I re-partitioned the 100gb drive so I can create a 20gig partition for Windows Vista, which is currently installing.

Assuming I dont have problems getting a suitable Video Driver working, Office 2007 will go on top of Windows Vista in a nice clean install.

If this all works it will be great I will be able to Demo Vista/Office2007 on the machine I carry with me everyday. Then boot into XP Pro/Office2003 for everyday use until Vista/Office 2007 reach a level of maturity (i.e. dont crash).

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The time has come the Latitude X300 is going into semi retirement

It has been the best laptop I ever used (to date).

Things have changed since the X300 was state of the art.

Latitude X300 12.1″ 1024×768 Vrs M1210 12.1″ Widescreen 1280×800

The screen resolution of the X300 is now becoming limiting. Connected to an external monitor it can support higher resolutions but natively 1024×768 is old school.

X300 Pentium M 1.2Ghz Vrs M1210 Core Duo 2.0Ghz

I havent heard a bad thing about Core Duo, apart the fact its not Core Duo 2 (even faster). The pentium M in the X300 can still cope with a 720p video playback so its no slouch, but I multitask a lot so having Core Duo is going to mean a lot to me.

X300 640mb Vrs M1210 1gb

The X300 shipped with the 640mb at the time and was and is pretty generious. Having 1gb just covers my furutre Vista/Office needs.

X300 Hard Disk 40gb Vrs M1210 100gb

I repeat you can never, ever have enough storage, so when buying a laptop get as much as you can afford.

X300 Optical DVD/CDRW Vrs DVD+RW

Yadda Yadda, It can burn DVD’s So what.

X300 Onboard – Intel Vrs M1210 Nvidia 256mb GeForce 7400

I am taking a gamble that the GeForce 7400 will be able to run Windows Vista Aero. It meets the specs for a screen running at 1280×800 i.e. 64mb video ram. But we will have to see.

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