I’ve owned Dells since, well, since I’ve owned Macs and Sun equipment. In 2001 I finally decided I was sick of buying, and parting together a machine with no real warranty – when I could buy one much cheaper which would generally do what I wanted.

My last few machines, all laptops, in successive order:
Inspiron 6400, Vostro 1400, the Inspiron 1525, and now, the Latitude E6500.

The Inspiron 6400 was sold when I obtained the Vostro, the Vostro met an untimely death and was replaced hastily (and cheaply) with the 1525; the 1525 consistantly overheated and the 1280×900 screen was way too small for working in. Even with virtual desktops, I kept running out of space.

I spoke with my Dell Gold Team Rep, and opted on the E6500n.

The Good:

• It’s still a paltry 15.4”, but I’m not into huge machines – I want functionality. I did get WUXGA (1920×1200) resolution.
• 4G RAM More RAM = Better Than. Spiffyfast.
• 250G SATA-2 w/ Drop Sensor. 7200rpm makes it pretty speedy.
• No OS! (FreeDOS), hence the E6500n.
• Intel PRO/1000 Ethernet. Industry-standard, even if the stock linux drivers are old.
• A 3 year warranty!
• The dual stick/mouse unit has a third button which is set to paste in KDE. Not bad.
• The encapsulating case is actually metal, not plastic. I haven’t seen that since my beloved 6400!

The Bad:

• The wireless is a crappy Broadcom 43xxx card, and that’s all that offered.
• The trackpad/nib mouse combo – if you do not disable the PS/2 access for it, you will forever be losing it and having your HD churn while kprints take up your dmesg buffer.
• Different keyboard map, again. This one is more true to my circa-2006ish Inspiron 6400, but I am now used to Delete being the upper-right key, not Page Up.
• Speakers are immediately to the left, and right of the keyboard. Rest your hands a bit offset? Prepare for muffled sound.
• Yet another new, and seemingly-pointless AC adaptor. This one mimmics Apple’s 2003 technology with an LED by the plug – but it doesn’t actually do anything. It lights when it’s plugged into AC; it does NOTHING differently when plugged/unplugged from the unit. No, it won’t even recognize a PA-10 or PA-12 unit, so you can toss out your old adapters.
• The SSD is nearly impossible to use. Unless you have two cards, that is. You need to press one card into the butt of the other – a good cm into the recesses of the unit to get it to eject, or lock into place.

The Ugly:

• Audio is HDA Intel G45 based; ALSA is still sketchy with 1.0.18. It pops, it hisses, it is weak and fairly annoying to get working.
• Wireless, again. This is easily exchanged with two screw removals (including the one retaining the mini-pcie card, but it’s quarter-height. I’m working around this by having my 4965AGN in the Cell slot (perfect fit), but I have lost my leds.
• I personally find no use in the backlit keyboard (I opted out of the pointless thumbprint sensor).

It also has an automatic level sensor you can enable in bios to turn up/down the LCD’s backlight with different light levels. I turned this on as a test, but will probably disable it whenever I reboot. Less than a week old and the damn thing’s already whining when I get a mostly-white screen.

The resolution is wonderful, and although I opted for the Intel G45 onboard (only ATI was offered with his model, not NVidia for some reason), I don’t play games, and I do get a rather crappy ~300fps with this screen, where my prior-gen Inspiron 1525 does about 500fps with it’s Intel onboard – however, I do also have nearly double the resolution.

The 7200 RPM HD is pretty speedy, and the unit is not prone to overheating; but it’s also double the cost for roughly the same machine as my Inspiron 1525 with a better HD and better screen resolution with crappier hardware support in Linux. I do not regret my decision, but if I didn’t absolutely need widescreen, I’d stick to a cheaper machine.

Matt may be off galavanting about the planet – but he certainly didn’t call it in – this mix has to be my favorite yet.

Nocturnal 205 really takes the whole thing back to its’ essence. Give it a go if you’re into trance/dance. His show’s quite brilliant, and 205, well, sublime.

Of course the only time you’d see a SAAB on TV is by a third party – GM never did anything to advertise, or keep the brand from becoming fairly lackluster.

Bridgestone surprised me when they made this ad in 2008 for the Superbowl:

And now, they’ve opted to use the 9-5 for another one:

Kind of sad that it takes a tire company to highlight what should have been considered one of your star vehicles. (C’mon, tell me that isn’t sexy!)

[Edit: Updated to a new working video for the second on November 12th, 2009]

I’m so glad that we’re bailing out a company that has as much concern about their consumers as the Cymothoa Exigua appears to have for it’s host.

First, a little backstory:

I purchased my car in 2008 from Allison Saab Mitsubishi of Reno, NV, and have to date had nothing but excellent experiences with them (aside from a 3 hour wait to replace the A-Arm covers due to a recall – but I guess it was their first done). It was a beautiful 9-5 with only 53 miles on it, cherry inside, and out (and still is inside).

In May of 2009, GM officially removed them as an authorized repair center, as well as their stock and parts. GM did this with no prior notification to either Allison Group, or anyone who purchased a vehicle through them – although they’ve been more than capable of pestering these recent buyers with biweekly surveys by both mail and telephone (the most recent conducted on June 1st at 7pm by a firm out of Canada).

My car was my ‘prestigious’ vehicle, and my first new – as such, I have done my best to keep it in great condition – I refused to drive it during the winter months (they salt and sand the roads), opting to use my old vehicle. When I finally opted to sell that one in April, my SAAB became my daily driver.

I work from a home office, and as such, have a short commute – my car has less than 4,000 miles.

I began noticing rather odd color changes/marks to my clear coat over the last month (the marks are not chips, they do not penetrate the clear coat, and the coat is still entirely smooth).

My car has been claybarred and carefully waxed to keep it in excellent shape. But this was enough for me to decided that upon my next visit (I’m about 500 miles until it’s time for another oil change), I’d have this paint issue looked at.

The last month’s heat combined with this month’s cold, and one of the tiny caps upon the bolt which cover the interior portion of the door above the interior handle release popped out, and will not reattach. The above listed issues, and a minor irritating squeak in the console became the catalyst for me to take my vehicle in for service.

Upon arriving, I was told that they could not look at my car, nor provide any warranty services. Out of loyalty to their customer, they did look at my paint, and stated that it was ‘odd’, and that they had not seen this issue before.

Upon returning home, I called GM (SAAB) Customer care, and was told that not only would anything from this days-prior-years-of-service dealer be denied for any warranty work, but that they would not even consider their assessment of the paint, either, but I could – at my own time and expense, take it to the nearest dealer (in Sacramento, CA – over 150 miles away, across the Sierra mountains) for one.

I have a brand new car with under 4,000 miles on it, defective paint, a squeaky console, and the nearest place I can even have it looked at is 2 hours away at best – and they’re not open on weekends.

My 4 year/50,000 mile warranty is only as good as I am able to use it – and my No-Charge Maintenance will cost me about $20 in gas, 300 miles of wear, and at least 4 hours of my time for an oil change.

I feel abandoned.

[Update: June 5th, 2009: It’s now started to make a ‘clicking’ noise in the console when I depress the brakes when in park, it sounds like a relay tripping. How the hell am I supposed to get this worked on? GM told me I could probably just drive it over for service – but since the nearest place is still 2 hours away and closed on the weekends, how am I meant to do that?]

[Update 2: June 25th, 2009: I was able to get the Sacramento dealership to diagnose it over the phone. Evidently, my solenoid has become noisy, but it’s a known issue.. however, “only annoying.”]

Not only do I love Runaway Box‘s sometimes twisted views, but their own Terry, of “Man in the Box” parallels my own feelings on twitter: