IppatsuBlog

This is my new laptop: a Dell Studio 15 1557 with a Intel i7 720QM CPU.

Short review

Here’s a very short review. First, the cons:

• There are no LEDs on the keyboard. No LED for caps lock, no LED for HD activity, nothing;
• by default the function keys (F1..F12) work as multimedia key (switch off WiFi, mute, volume up and so on), but this setting can be changed in the BIOS;
• there is no numeric keypad. Usually on 15” laptops using the Fn key some keys can be used as numeric keypad, but this is not the case: there is simply no way to have a numeric keypad. This baffled me and it is annoying, especially on Windows. On the italian keyboard layout there is no “~” or “È” key, so we type them using the numeric keypad and tapping Alt+0126 or Alt+0200. Since there is no numeric keypad I have to copy&paste those characters. I’ll look for an explanation from Dell;
• the fast CPU and graphic card mean a lot of heat: the system idles at 50 °C and can easily reach 70 °C under stress.

Pros:

• the chassis is sturdy;
• the touchpad supports multitouch, allowing for some cool gestures when using Windows;
• the HD is huge (500GB);
• the i7 CPU is as fast as it can get on laptops, looking at 8 columns for CPU load in the task manager gives a warm fuzzy feeling (the i7 720QM is a quad-core CPU with hyperthreading, so  the OS thinks that there are 8 CPUs);
• the graphic card isn’t the fastest one available for laptops, but still I was able to play Mirror’s Edge with high settings;
• I can virtualize Windows XP (and use IBM DB2 on it) on Windows Vista while browsing with Firefox and chatting and installing OpenOffice and still the average CPU load is at 30%;
• the DDR3 RAM is fast;
• did I say that it is fast?

Linux on Dell Studio 15 1557

I wanted to install Linux on it, my distro of choice being Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, but plain Ubuntu should run flawlessy too. The good news is that all the hardware is supported: WiFi, SD reader, ATI card, audio, everything. The bad news is that you have to fiddle a little to make it work. Here’s some gotchas:

1. Don’t install any proprietary driver while using the Live CD. The Broadcom STA driver, needed to make the wireless work, made my system freeze. And if it freezes while it’s modifying the partition table you’ll be very, very sorry. Just install the system without doing anything fancy.
2. The wireless card is reported by lspci as 05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01). If you have internet access via Ethernet just use the Hardware Drivers manager to install the Broadcom STA wireless driver. If you don’t have internet access use Synaptic (on Ubuntu) or KPackageKit (on Kubuntu) or apt-cdrom (everywhere) to add the installation cd-rom as software source and then use the Hardware Drivers manager.
3. To make the audio work edit as root /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and add this line:

   options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6

   and then execute:

   sudo alsa force-reload

And that’s it, enjoy your Linux :)

(Not so) fun fact: when rebooting the system the first time, after installing Kubuntu, the system didn’t boot, even the BIOS screen didn’t show up. It just beeped four times and then turned off. Dell’s manual says that “four beeps = possible motherboard damage”, which just doesn’t make sense. However I tried again after a couple of minutes and it worked. I don’t know why and I hope it doesn’t happen again.