So it's now been almost two weeks since I got my new machine and I'm happy to report that things are going well. No more video problems (even though I ended up with yet another nVidia card) and the system has been rock solid. It's sad that this should astound me, but this has been one of the smoothest installations of a new machine and OS that I can remember in a long time. Other than the huge amount of time that's gone into updating everything, the process has gone through without any problems.

As I mentioned I got a Dell Inspiron 1520 (2ghz, 2 gig, 160gig) to replace last year's Inspiron 9400 Dual Core. Performance wise this new machine is not noticeably faster although it is a Core 2 Duo vs. the original Core Duo. Two big improvements however: Battery life is drastically improved - with the two batteries combined I got 5 1/2 hours of time out of them with active operation, where the old one barely made 4 hours even with new batteries. With a little lighter use (ie. not coding in VS the whole time and online to source control) this could probably stretch quite a bit more. The other thing that is really nice: The new machine is super quiet. The old hard-drive was very clunky and would squeak and squeal quite a bit - the new drive much quieter. Part of this probably is due to the recent Vista updates which seem to have reduced disk churning significantly.

There are few things that the old 17" machine had that I miss: No DVI port on the 1520, which is not a huge deal, but would have been nice. I had to go digging for some analog cables actually. If you're a gamer it's something to consider. The old machine had 6 USB ports the new one only 4. Most of the ports on the 1520 also are off to the right side rather than in the back which I've always found kinda messy.

And last but not least the 1520 has a new keyboard layout that has suck written all over it. Again I didn't closely check this out beforehand, but the 1520 has the single row of keys (Delete, Home, PgUp, PgDn, End) all in one line on the right rather than the much more developer friendly diamond layout for keys. I was just reminded how annoying it is to go to that layout when I do use the machine without a keyboard. I just can't get used to this layout while coding. It's bad enough that for presentations that involve coding I think I'm going to have to carry a keyboard with me <s>.

AHCI Driver Problem Blue Screening

There was one minor problem that I did run into though: When I got my machine first thing I did is pave it and reinstall Vista from scratch with Vista Ultimate (vs. Home Premium or whatever came with the machine). The install went fine, however I noticed that when I restarted the machine (ie. exit Vista and hit RESTART) the machine without completely shutting down it would blue screen immediately after the Bios screen and would keep doing so on restarts. A couple of tiny heart attacks later I found that if I turn off the machine completely and restart it boots fine - it's just a restart WITHOUT shutting down completely that blue screened.

It turns out this is a problem because Dell sets the BIOS to use AHCI mode for the hard disk and this mode requires a special driver to work properly. Apparently the differences are minor so the machine works fine with regular SATA drivers but during boot it will complain and blue screen. By pure chance I ran into a post by Jeff Atwood  who had run into a similar situation with his new ultra portable Dell M1330. The solution in my case - since Vista was already installed - was to switch the hard drive into plain ATA mode which fixed the blue screen on startup. But the proper solution is to install the AHCI driver when installing Vista. I talked briefly with Jeff about this and he mentioned that he didn't see any improvements in performance with the AHCI driver - even with a Flash Cache module installed in his machine. So for the moment at least this won't be an issue either way.

So overall, I'm happy with my new machine mainly because it's been a hassle free two weeks. Usually a new install you're always fretting for something to go wrong in this period of time. You know the hard disk blows up or the inevitable avalanche of Windows updates to refresh machine trash the system. None of that.

All's good for the moment. Yay! We'll see how it holds up over time.