My new laptop – A Dell Studio XPS 1645

Hardware

LobsterPot

Windows 7

![Dell Studio XPS 16 Black Open](../../assets/2010/04/dell studio xps 16 black open.jpg)One tool that I was lacking in my new role as a Senior Consultant for LobsterPot Solutions was a laptop computer. Back in my UniSA days, if you needed a laptop for a presentation or a conference you just borrowed one, so it was never a problem. Post-UniSA I borrowed my Mum’s nice Toshiba, or more recently the small (but capable) HP Mini Netbook that I got from Tech-Ed last year.

Rob and I did a fair bit of research, compared brands and options (including the Sony Z-series which I see Nigel chose), and settled on the Dell Studio XPS 16 model. Being a “laptop-newbie” I particularly valued Rob’s good experience with his previous Dell laptop.

The XPS 16 comes with:

The CPU and RAM are similar to the Hyper-V server I built – though happily, while this CPU is also a Core i7, unlike it’s desktop cousin it doesn’t require a great whopping heatsink/cooler stuck on top (which could make shutting the lid a bit tricky!)

Some nice things I’ve discovered so far:

After having a quick play I was pleasantly surprised to find that Dell had shipped it with the latest BIOS firmware - that is refreshing. Nevertheless, after a precautionary backup to my Windows Home Server, I did a clean install of Windows 7 x64 Ultimate and am proceeding to load up all the various “mandatory” applications (Office, SQL Server, Visual Studio, etc).

I’m also thinking I might leverage Windows 7’s “boot to VHD” feature to have separate Win7 instances where I can try out pre-release/beta software without “polluting” my primary OS.

![Dell Studio XPS 16 Red](../../assets/2010/04/dell studio xps 16 red.jpg) We chose the red ones, because a) they go faster (obviously!) and b) it kind of matches the red of the LobsterPot logo :-)