So maybe that needs explaining. The standard form for a BlackadderJoke is: The Xiest Y since Z, where Z often involves X and Y.

Example: Dell is the crappiest company since crappy Ted McCrapShite crapped himself playing craps on the crapper.

But they’re not as bad as Sony.

The BBC News Online website produces some amusing miscategorisations, e.g. Man bailed over top agent’s death was listed under entertainment, simply because the guy involved was an agent.

The above example isn’t too bad really. Not compared to the Technology section. Any story involving computers in any way whatsoever gets filed under Technology. “Terrorists Personally Beat 4/5 of World Population Over Head With Laptop” would open with a comment on How The Technology of Tomorrow Is Changing Our Lives - Today!

As the warranty is due to run out soon, I thought I’d note down some review-like factoids that only tend to show up in long term tests:

Good Things

• The screen.

  1600×1200 and only 15″ wide means it’s very high resolution, in terms of dots per inch. This means you can jack up the font size and enjoy nicer looking text. Or you could leave the font size the same and go blind squinting at it.

  It arrived with one dead pixel, just above the bottom. My initial reaction was “oh damn, now I get to look at a black dot obscuring all my work forever!” but I actually never notice it. Maybe if it was in the middle of the screen it would be annoying, but if it’s not, my advice is to forget about it.

  Compared to newer TFTs, it’s not very bright, but that’s no big deal.

• The peripherals

  It’s tempting to go for a faster CPU in exchange for fewer features; I’m glad I didn’t. You can always live without that extra 200Mhz, but when you need to plug in a firewire device, the port is either there or it isn’t.

  I’ve found the TV-out port useful too, amazingly enough, although not the serial, parallel or docking ports.

• The compatibility

  It works with everything! Even a filthy evil Sony DV-camera with awkward firewire requirements! And most importantly, all manner of Linuces run flawlessly.

  The Linux-compatibility is helped by the fact that this is a popular laptop, hence there are lots of other people out there writing cool software for it (e.g. Massimo Dal Zotto, a Debian guy).

• The battery life

  The Inspiron 8000 has a “media bay” into which you can plug a floppy drive, an optical drive, or an extra battery. With both batteries in, the machine would last a good 5 hours of moderate use. However, see below.

• Speedstep

  The CPU is a 1Ghz Pentium III, which is pretty good, but it also steps down to 700Mhz, which is great. At the lower speed, the fan almost never comes on (as opposed to the higher speed, where it’s on constantly and the CPU gets up to 80 degrees celsius), thus giving a silent machine. The only sound is the hiss of the hard disk platters rotating.

  If you want a silent PC, a laptop in power saving mode is the only easy way. However, see below (again).

• The build

  It’s not made of titanium, and the plastic creaks a bit when you pick it up, but it’s held together so far.

Bad Things

• The batteries themselves

  They last for a long time, but they don’t last long. That is, after one year, you’ll be lucky to get 30 seconds of power out of them. Naturally, the warranty only covers the first year, and they cost UKP75 each. This is a very big, very hidden, cost.

• The Speedstep implementation

  Running at only 700Mhz is a good thing, but presumably due to the marketing department at Dell whipping the Engineering department harder to get the hardware finished sooner, the I8K was released with totally buggered Speedstep support. You can’t switch speeds without rebooting, and the only way to boot in 700Mhz mode is to boot it on battery power. This can be tricky if the batteries have gone, which they will have.

Awful Things

• Dell

  Most encounters with Dell, the company, go like this:

  Ooh, low prices!
  Ooh, fast hardware!
  (short interval)
  Hmm, it’s broken.
  Hmm, it’s still broken.
  Hmm, it’s still broken and tech support won’t do a damn thing about it.
  (long interval)
  RAGE
  (long interval)
  Threats to senior managers induce tech support to send a replacement part.

  They got my order wrong when I ordered it 3 years ago. A replacement hard drive was eventually sent, but I never got the internal network card. Thus to this day I have one of those dodgy PCMCIA-plus-hanging-out-adapter jobbies which dramatically decreases the robustness of the system, and interacts poorly with the BIOS - you have to do the “commenting out port 0×800-0×8ff” trick to make it work.

  I thought that would be it, but the hard drive they sent was an IBM Travelstar, presumably the laptop version of the IBM Deathstar. It broke two months ago and I got a replacement one month ago. Note to warranty purchasers: Next business day warranty is 100% worthless. They will not send you anything the “next day”.

  The Dell tech support website is excellent, provided you have a non-problem. It’s set up to solve problems like “Help! I maximised a window and now I can’t see my desktop!” If the problem is an actual problem - an actual broken hardware type of problem - you’re stuffed. The hard drive could have caught fire and blasted out the side of the machine, and they’d still ask you to run the diagnostics CD.

  On the plus side, I now have a 60Gb Fujitsu drive which is much quieter and faster (and 12Gb bigger!) than the old Travelstar.

Conclusion

If you could buy a laptop from the Taiwanese company that actually manufactures them, that would be great. Unfortunately, to get nice Dell hardware, you have to deal with shitty Dell.

In short, the hardware is good, but the company is the $BlackadderJoke.