2008-10-26 #1

Rebuild + Crappy Sound

So the crashing kind of came to a head, so I went out and purchased a new hard drive. It's a 7200RPM 320GB drive, an improvement in both ways over the 5400RPM 120GB drive the computer came with.

One of my customers has purchased a bunch of D830s recently, so I borrowed the Dell Vista install DVD. The DVD recognizes that you have a Dell (maybe this specific version, I don't know) and automatically enters and activates the key for you. Which is cool.

I'm trying the Sidebar for a while again. I downloaded a couple of gadgets that let me look at memory/CPU usage, and one that let me know which wireless network I was connected to. After less than a day I reduced the Sidebar gadgets to two Photo gadgets (one family-only, one all photos) and the Weather Network's sidebar gadget (which is huge but appears to work). Don't know if this will last, I may just go back to the tray gadget for the Weather Network thing, there isn't really too much value in the Sidebar for me, it's just clutter.

So, some things which are annoying me thus far:

• Sometimes you can't rename networks when they pop up. I have a bunch of VMware networks defined, and they are all Unidentified Network. I can't rename them, although I can define them as private, which is better than public.
• The sound blows. It is thin and tinny through the local speakers (which is understandable when allowing for the microscopic speakers in the laptop). It doesn't work through the dock's headphone jack (fixable through a driver update). It is thin and tinny and has absolutely no bass when played through a headset or speakers (maskable with my super-bass speaker set, but sucky through a headset). And it appears that this has been the case since the unit was released. "Hi Res Audio Device" my ass. (Dell Forum Post)

I have already spent a couple of hours messing with this. Several drivers and reboots later, the sound still blows.

(See also my note about Can't Copy Source Files.)