Laptop

Dell XPS 14z

~ Aditya

Yesterday was a happy day – Rags kept her job in the latest office shakeout and I got my new laptop, the Dell XPS 14z.

Today was a sad and miserable day. Rags still has her job. But the laptop, it’s a shame, really.

Let’s begin with the positives:

  1. Despite not being as light, or slim as the ultrabooks, or being black, it does look nice.
  2. It feels solid. The built seems good with no flaky bits to it (very unlike the loose, plasticky feel I got from Toshiba Latitude at the store)
  3. The insides are powerful – i5 processor, 6 gigs ram and 500gig hdd work together brilliantly to deliver a great feel.
  4. Umm… can’t think anymore!

Now the issues. Well, have already posted the detailed review on Dell’s website, but since they haven’t accepted it yet, shall post it here too:

If you use the keyboard for anything more than filling forms and writing emails, do NOT buy this laptop.

I have been a big fan of Dell’s laptops having used Latitudes at work for years and having loved my XPS M1330 last 3 years. It was thus natural that when I needed to replace my old XPS M1330, I chose the 14z. Of course, the glowing reviews all over the web and promos by Dell helped. Bad, Bad decision. At least now I know which websites NOT to trust for reviews.

Problems with the laptop are on four counts:

1. Keyboard
2. Display
3. WiFi chip
4. Trackpad position

The Keyboard has a super weird keyboard layout. There are no dedicated context menu (right click), page up, page down, home or end keys.

The page up, page down, home and end keys are provided as Fn-triggered overlays on the arrow/direction keys. Unfortunately, the way fn, shift and arrow keys are placed, makes it almost impossible to use them together to select text, killing them for all practical purposes.

The context menu / right click key is completely gone. Out. Disappeared! So either get used to moving the mouse to over the item and right clicking, or use that ultra hard to reach shortcut (Shift-F10) to invoke that menu.

The display is mixed – while the colours are rendered true, unlike some other laptops I tried, the max resolution is a pitiable 1366×768. Even then, most of the times you can easily see the tiny grids of pixels on the screen. Even my 3 year old XPS M1330 had a better screen. Truly horrible.

Finally, the wifi chip. This may only be a personal thing but, with the wifi router in living room, I get zero connectivity on the laptop in my bed room at the other end of the house. In contrast, my old XPS M1330 and partner’s Studio 15 both work comfortably on wireless in that room.

There’s another issue with the laptop, though this might have to do with my hand size (medium) – the trackpad is placed about 3/4th an inch too much to the right. This means that while typing, the base of my left hand frequently touches the touchpad and takes the curser away!

My main uses for a laptop are for software development and managing my photos. I am also a heavy keyboard user. The problems with keyboard and trackpad ensure I can’t use it for software development and the poor display means it is no use for managing my photos.

I still like the insides of the device – the CPU-RAM-HDD-Ports-Performance. But it comes in a really buggy shell. I’ll maybe give it another day or two to see if I can find a way around the keyboard issues, but most likely am sending it back for a refund.

So much for trusting a brand based on past experiences!

Frankly, I would have lived with the weak wifi receiver and a low res screen. But I just can’t bear with that horribly designed keyboard and wrongly placed touchpad. If Dell has to learn anything from Apple, then they should forget about copying them, instead just learn about the importance of user interface and why not to screw it up – it can ruin an otherwise brilliant machine to bits.

Anyway, wrote to Dell a few minutes back asking them to cancel the order and take the laptop back and refund my money. Going to give the old XPS for repair again tomorrow. Hope it lasts a month this time without issues – the month that Dell will invariably take to return my money so I can buy some other laptop.

P.S.: Installed Ubuntu on the laptop wiping off Windows 7 completely. Hope Dell doesn’t charge me for this!

A night of suffering

~ Aditya

The refactoring continues.

After moving all xhr calls from JSON to html, backed by django templating on the server, realised that in order to implement offline, localStorage based system, I still need to generate html at the browser. I could have taken the old, working version with html generating via js strings but it will need another load of work when the design of page starts changing. So, spent the night researching browser-based templating systems. Have shortlisted three – mustache, Closure and Pure. All seem to be taking strange approaches. So far Closure seems to be the one I’ll go with, but the final call will happen tomorrow after some more research.

Meanwhile, the pen drive finally seems to have filled up, so can’t work off it anymore. Have saved all that I wanted to in dropbox and in bookmark syncs. Gonna reformat and recreate the live USB now so I can start working again tomorrow. The new laptop still isn’t featured on dell website though people have started talking about it on twitter. Seems like it’ll be another week or so before I finally get my hands on it and can create a full development environment. The new liveUSB should last till then, I hope.

Time to sleep now. Ciao.