Yippee! Thanks to Daco’s good luck charm — the phone number of a real person at UPS– my long-awaited new laptop arrived yesterday at 5:25 p.m. (I had to leave at 5:30). I didn’t even have to call… just the option to do so was enough.<\/p>\n
It’s light. It’s fast. It has little niceities like a slot for my camera card, so when I forget the Nikon-specific cable, I don’t have to go buy a new one like I did last Summer. The wireless is internal, so I don’t have to worry about a PCMCIA card sticking out the side, waiting to break off. The USB ports are 2.0, so it won’t take as long to back up as the old one did.<\/p>\n
The experience is a decidedly mixed blessing, though: while I ordered it on Friday and received it on Wednesday (good show of agile manufacturing<\/a>), it isn’t perfect. Before ordering, I called and was heartily assured by a Dell consultant that the Dell 1500 (802.11n) internal wireless card would definitely work with a Belkin pre-n router.<\/p>\n Not<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Also, when I key in my service tag number on the Dell support website (useful for things like bios upgrades, driver updates, and battery recall notices), I get some weird error message about this being a machine sold outside the country.<\/p>\n Funny, the UPS tracking slip shows that it was manufactured in Nashville, and went straight from there to here.<\/p>\n The entire day was spent 1) loading the 16Gb of stuff I can’t live without from the backup of my old system, deleting all the garbage (AOL, Google Desktop, etc.) they ship on it, while bouncing around between a couple of folks at Dell and five at Belkin.<\/p>\n TIP: Linksys has the world’s greatest tech support, and they’re open 24\/7. Belkin tech support speaks with a heavy Mexican accent (until you get to level 2, anyway) keeps California banker’s hours, and couldn’t fix it.<\/p>\n I strongly suspect that the Dell 1500 wireless adapter is simply incompatible with the Belkin router, even though both are pre-n. If this is the case, Dell has agreed to send a new card for me to install.<\/p>\n Left with the choices of 1) buy a Belkin 802.11-g USB adapter, or 2) rig something from what I have lying around the house, I chose the cheap option to tide me over. As it turns out, an old Linksys 802.11-b wireless access point cabled into the back of the Belkin provides enough of a signal for me to work on the deck.<\/p>\n That’s all I want… I want to be able to go outside, where I can think.<\/p>\n Only now, I can publish what I think so much faster… which might or might not be a good thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yippee! Thanks to Daco’s good luck charm — the phone number of a real person at UPS– my long-awaited new laptop arrived yesterday at 5:25 p.m. (I had to leave at 5:30). I didn’t even have to call… just the … Continue reading