Changing My Shell

Oct 9, 2007

It was time to get a new laptop - my old one was taking eight hours to compress one hour of Flash video, something I anticipate doing a lot of. After much agonizing back in August, I decided to get a(nother) Dell.

Yes, yes, I know that Macintoshes are far sexier and supposedly better for graphics and video (though I could get confirmation on this from only one person who had actually done intensive video work on both - perhaps the claims of Mac superiority are not as substantiated as the Mac fans would like us to believe?). But a Mac with similar processor power, RAM, etc. costs $1000 more than the Dell, and the budget wouldn't stretch to that.

Dell? I hear you shudder. Doesn't their service, er, suck legendarily? Actually, Dell in Italy is a happy little island of (relative) tech support competence. Their market here is primarily business (in fact, it's impossible to get support outside of business hours, which can be a problem when your problem is a home computer that needs to be swapped out), so their techies seem to be trained to deal with customers who actually have brains. I've generally had very good experiences with them, including a completely free replacement of our major home desktop system, which burned up (almost literally) a month before the three-year warranty expired. And that was probably even my fault: the fan on the super-fancy graphics card (which, it turns out, would only be useful for 3D gaming, which none of us does) got clogged with dust; it had never occurred to me that I needed to vacuum inside the machine.

So I ordered my new Dell Inspiron 1520 from Dell Italy while I was still in the US, and it was even delivered two weeks earlier than the promised date (big backlog on these guys, shortage of CPU chips apparently).

The only hitch is that nowadays they only offer Windows Vista, and up to now I've been using XP. So far I haven't had to pay for a software upgrade, but sooner or later, when I decide to really start using the copy of Adobe Premiere I own, it's gonna cost me.

Moving computers is always traumatic. When I completely cleaned out and reinstalled the old laptop in January, the external HD I had backed up to crashed at the same time, wiping out six months of various personal data (no, I am not going back to re-enter all those !@#$@# receipts into Quicken!). I feel vulnerable during a computer move, like a hermit crab changing its shell.

But (fingers crossed, let's not irritate the computer gods), this one seems to have gone smoothly. I got the final missing piece - the Sun VPN software - installed this morning, and everything in my computer environment seems to be working more or less normally. MozBackup made copying Thunderbird and Firefox settings and files a breeze - I love it when software actually works as advertised (what, me cynical? I've just been in the software business too long).

I haven't even bothered to install Microsoft Office - OpenOffice works just fine. I'll miss some of the time-smoothed elegance of Excel, but I can live with that. Microsoft would probably make me buy an upgrade anyhow, and I ain't giving them any more of my money!

Physically, the new machine is lovely. I like the shiny screen, and so far don't find reflections distracting. The keyboard is soft with almost a padded feel, neither too clicky nor too rubbery. There are 4 USB ports! And, unadvertised on the Dell site, it's got a card reader, so I no longer have to worry about forgetting my camera's USB cable. Plus of course the Firewire port I absolutely need for video.

And it's four times as fast processing video - the same version of Sorenson Squeeze takes about two hours to compress an hour of video, instead of eight. Bliss!