New XPS Laptop

It's ironic that I'm writing this entry about my new XPS M1330 Dell on an Apple Macbook in the Apple store in Soho. I got delivery of the new XPS last week, on a deal that was pretty impressive. In total, I got around $900 off the retail price of the XPS (there was a big discount on the Dell website, and my company also offer an employee discount) so definitely was a bargain, compared to the hardware specs of a Macbook.

Dell have done better with their packaging nowadays, with a swanky leather book to keep all the installation CDs that come with the system. Plus it's all originals as well.

Of course, with these originals, the first thing I did was to reinstall the system. Yes, there were lots of things that were pre-loaded with the system that I really didn't need and made the computer a bit slow on startup, but upon reinstallation, it's very snappy.

Dell have actually included some decent software with the system, I was able to get Adobe Premier Photo Elements (full version) for free, which adds another $100 to the deal. So I've been porting my pics out of iLife and into Elements, which in itself is a bit of a learning curve.

The main things that have impressed so far:

1. HDMI output to the LCD at home works like a charm, and getting a 42-inch TV to edit photos will be awesome.
2. SD Card slot, so no need to plug in the camera anymore
3. Vista I think is not too bad, but just need a few tweaks to remove so of those stupid popup notifications. Aero interface looks slick.
4. Editing photos is so fast!! The 3Gb of RAM is so good for Elements.

I want to see how the computer handles games!

So no post-purchase dissonance, Dell has done a very good job with the XPS. Vista does take a bit more work to get to a state that works well, but I think MS will continue to improve it.

It's funny that at a stage when a lot of people are moving to Mac, I'm moving back to Windows.

On another note, that Mac Air is pretty sweet as a secondary laptop to run around with :)