I’ve picked up a Dell Inspiron 1525 for my mom’s birthday. Being that her current machine is pretty much email only at the moment this post should not be a spoiler for her.
Issues:
1) No Power
Step #1 of the quick start guide is to plug the power cable into the power brick. The cable is 3 pronged and the brick plug is two pronged. Showstopper.
2) Support or lack thereof
Call up Dell support; it warns me of a 25 minute delay and suggests I use online chat. While waiting I try online chat.
Attempt #1: it tells Safari to download a .dll.
Attempt #2: move to Firefox on my Mac; same thing. I guess they assume once someone switches to a Mac they don’t go back.
Attempt #3: move to Firefox on my work machine (WinXP). I get into a chat room. After about 15 minutes I move from #5 to #1 in the queue. I get a message about how may I assist you today and two seconds later the session ends.
Attempt #4: move to IE6 on Windows. Wait five minutes in a chat queue to be disconnected after 4 seconds after I’m asked how may I be helped today.
By then the voice call finally goes through. The rep tells me it’s their fault and they’ll fix it. After about 25 more minutes on hold I get a case # and a promise that I’ll have the correct parts to power the laptop by Wednesday. We’ll see.
I get two emails containing the logs of my 2 and 4 second chats.
3) Vista Setup and Updating
Get through the basic Vista Premium setup and goto windows update off of the Welcome Center. It warns be that I don’t have automatic updates set and gives me a button to turn them on. Since my mother is on dialup I want her to be able to control when she updates. However there is no “update now” button. After digging through the advanced page I find the option that I want.
The machine immediately warns me that the windows update is out of date for a machine made 3 days ago and I have to download an updated version. Nice. After that I’m able to bring her 3 day old machine up-to-date with 5 required updates, 7 recommended and 3 new drivers. A bit of time and a reboot later I’m up-to-date as far as it’s concerned. Tomorrow’s patch Tuesday so I’ll have to do this again.
No option for SP1. I hope I get the option soon. I don’t want her to have to download that over dialup. If I don’t see it soon I’ll manually download it.
4) Word Perfect X3
It asks me for the 14 character serial number. Turns out that the 14 character string on the CD is not it. After digging through the box I find an “product authenticity card”. The string on it is accepted as the “serial number”.
All I want is WordPerfect but a number of options on the installer cannot be unchecked. Go with the minimum install. The icon it puts on the desktop is to some launcher program. I right mouse drag the WordPerfect icon from the All Programs menu to my desktop. Instead of getting the “Move/Copy/Shortcut” menu it moves the shortcut from the menu to the desktop. I copy it and put it back.
I want to download the Vista compatibility update but it wants me to register before letting me get it. I don’t want to register it in my name because it’s mom’s machine. I don’t want to register it in her name as they’ll start emailing her. Will have to look into this later.
5) MS Office 2007
First time I’ve dealt with the retail version. I now understand people’s frustration about opening the box. It looks like a book and has a hinge looking thing. But it does not open like a book. There are two squeeze tab things part way down the box edge but they are actually the locks for the mechanism; squeezing them makes it harder to open the box. On the top there is a red tab and an indentation that looks like it should be pushed. On top of that is the security mechanism that needs to be cut.
This thing violates almost every principle in Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. It begs the joke of “I see Microsoft has moved their ease of use expertise to their packaging”. Not a good thing.
It appears that Microsoft has a page explaining how to open the box. It turns out the tab is supposed to be used after all.
Installation and setup works. At the end it asks me if I want to check for Office updates. I click on it and it takes me to a page with Office info but no option to get updates. Going to officeupdate.microsoft.com fixes this.
Launching MS Word for the first time also launches the Welcome Center that conveniently covers the Office activation window. If I click on MS Word window it cannot shift focus back to show me the activation window because of dialog modality. Once I dismiss the Welcome Center I can activate and use Word.
Conclusion
Well, except for data migration and a few more updates I think this thing is ready to go. Mom should like it.
I have only about 30-40min of battery life in it so I’ll probably wait until I get the A/C power fix from Dell.
