MedicSN6 Posted August 25, 2008 Share Posted August 25, 2008 (edited) I ordered a Dell Studio 17 yesterday. A good bit of bells and whistles with it as well. As for specs: I ordered the graphite gray top with blue accents on the sides of the upper part with the screen. Studio 1735, Intel Core 2 Duo T9300, 2.5GHz, 800Mhz, 6M L2 Cache Graphite Grey with Blue U-Trim 4GB, DDR2, 2 Dimm Standard Keyboard 8X Slot Load CD / DVD Burner (Dual Layer DVD+/-R Drive) Hi Resolution, glossy widescreen 17.0 inch display (1920x1200) ATI MOBILITY RADEON HD 3650 320G 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 Home Premium Edition, English Hi-Res. TL widescreen 17.0 inch WLED display (1920x1200) w/ 2.0M Pixel Camera Integrated High Definition Audio 2.0 Dell Wireless 1397 802.11g Half Mini Card Integrated 2.0M Pixel Webcam 56 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery DISC - DELL RESOURCE DVD,BACK-UP INSP1735 DISC - Roxio Creator DE 10 DISC - Vista, PC-Restore, Dim/Insp So with any laptop that I have purchased, this one mainly for school, i have chosen to max out the items that I cannot truly upgrade myself or that may be difficult to upgrade or expensive later on. This being a 17" screen, the C2D T9300 Intel chip, 4MB of RAM, and a 320 GB HDD. (I can add another HDD later, but it can only handle 640 GB total, so I will wait for the price of the hi-cap drives to come down some.) I am really excited about this, except for the fact that it has Vista and not XP. I asked the rep if they could put XP on it and he said they dont offer it for this system at all. Only the XPS models which are far more expensive than what I wanted to pay. So total out the door for this setup is $1,334. Which Uncle Sam will pay for through the GI Bill. It's like applying my taxes from the past few months to myself. It's great. If you google "Studio 17" you will get some videos. Mostly reviews, a couple unboxing vids, and a couple where people have had problems with something or where they didnt like the design. I will upgrade the battery at some point but because this design has just come out within a month and a half, the batteries are still really expensive. I will wait for the prices to come down. If you guys want me to, I will make an unboxing video and power it up for the first time then and there. The other unboxing videos pretty much suck and are kinda the same but mine would be so much better! Let me know. CLOSER LOOK Edited August 25, 2008 by Medic~SPARTA~ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MedicSN6 Posted September 6, 2008 Author Share Posted September 6, 2008 okay so the new notebook has arrived. unfortunately, I dont have internet access on the notebook here at work. so I am at the mercy of what can fit on my thumb drive. I am in the process of uninstalling the junk that comes on it and creating a list of things to put on it. So far the list is: Programs: Dreamweaver cs3 or 8 (whichever I have) SwishMax2 Filezilla firefox MS Office 2K7 AnyDVD DVDFab Platinum Games: Eve-Online ArmA with mods(to test quality and see if it is worth playing) CoD4 with mods(to test quality and see if it is worth playing) Game tools: teamspeak2 Eve-Mon Eve Fitting Tool x-fire If you guys can think of any more that would be useful, let me know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoScream~SPARTA~ Posted September 6, 2008 Share Posted September 6, 2008 Programs: Dreamweaver cs3 or 8 (whichever I have) SwishMax2 Filezilla firefox MS Office 2K7 AnyDVD DVDFab Platinum ADD Teamspeak 2.0 corel paint shop pro Photoshop CS3 Clone DVD Nero 8 Alcohol 120% DU meter 3 Skype VOIP FRAPS CuteFTP Pro AntiVirus (Internet security) Adobe Acroread 7 Zip Win Rar Quick Par Newsleecher Xvid codec pack Printer drivers Can't think of much more Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MUTILATER Posted September 7, 2008 Share Posted September 7, 2008 Outpost Pro (Firewall) SpywareBlaster Spybot Search And Destroy Tune Up Utilities JV 16 Power Tools Acronis True Image (Image Ya drive from fresh ... ) Partition Management (New Paragon SW) Quick Time Lite Crap Cleaner Java A-Squared Erunt (Backups) Download Manager (Getright & Integrate it to Firefox) Winamp Pro BT Client U-Torrent Carry a nice big fat 750GB external E-Sata/USB/Firewire drive with you as well, this is where you stash your backups and progs as you upgrade or replace, on top of storage for entertainment rubbish, movies and music. Nice to keep handy then you can rape and pillage any thing you can find while using some other wankers unsecured wireless connection. L8R Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dporter Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 Definitely update us on the game performance. I'm interested to see how good those radeon 3650's are. I'm looking at laptops in that price range for some mobile gaming. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MedicSN6 Posted September 8, 2008 Author Share Posted September 8, 2008 Definitely update us on the game performance. I'm interested to see how good those radeon 3650's are. I'm looking at laptops in that price range for some mobile gaming. I have installed Cod4 and patched it to 1.7. I am able to play quite nicely in widescreen but at the lower resolutions like 1280x800. It is a bit sluggish and the frame rate is terrible at anything higher. But at the medium level resolutions you should be able to play Cod4 very well. Matter of fact I got booted from a server this after noon for playing TOO good. ;) SPARTANS LEAD THE WAY! But for some reason, the server browser doesnt seem to find the GRnet server. i have search and searched, and added the ip to faves but it doesnt find it. Weird. Not a graphics problem but definitely a problem. Anyway. EVE-Online plays very well at 1920x1200 with all settings maxed out including HDR and Shadows set to HIGH. Hope this helps a bit for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dporter Posted September 9, 2008 Share Posted September 9, 2008 Absolutely. Thanks. I found a helpful website that I can't find at the moment but it ranks all the laptop graphics cards and it rated the 3650 as a middle range card. That is about the specs I was hoping it would run it at so that is very good to know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
custard~SPARTA~ Posted September 9, 2008 Share Posted September 9, 2008 I have installed Cod4 and patched it to 1.7. I am able to play quite nicely in widescreen but at the lower resolutions like 1280x800. It is a bit sluggish and the frame rate is terrible at anything higher. But at the medium level resolutions you should be able to play Cod4 very well. Matter of fact I got booted from a server this after noon for playing TOO good. ;) SPARTANS LEAD THE WAY! But for some reason, the server browser doesnt seem to find the GRnet server. i have search and searched, and added the ip to faves but it doesnt find it. Weird. Not a graphics problem but definitely a problem. Anyway. EVE-Online plays very well at 1920x1200 with all settings maxed out including HDR and Shadows set to HIGH. Hope this helps a bit for you. Have you changed the port for the gr.net server to 28960 mate Zeno had to change it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MedicSN6 Posted September 9, 2008 Author Share Posted September 9, 2008 Yes, I added all of the servers to my favorites folder. But the grnet server is the only one that is currently up atm I believe. I am not sure what the problem is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CoBoL~SPARTA~ Posted September 10, 2008 Share Posted September 10, 2008 What's the battery life like. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krambo Posted September 10, 2008 Share Posted September 10, 2008 my grandad just got 1 of these, smart as hell. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MedicSN6 Posted September 10, 2008 Author Share Posted September 10, 2008 battery life is Ok. a mere 2 hours or so for running without the DVD spinning constantly. You could watch a full length movie running on battery though. The extended battery will yield roughly another hours worth of time but at $299.99 it is a bit pricey at the moment. Definitely a purchase after the prices come down a bit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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