Anybody here have a Dell Vostro Laptop?

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bumpity bump

I don't have one, but I have had to work with a couple.

Pros - A lot of everything in a nice package. Once you dump Dell's OS and reinstall everything from scratch, it's fine.

Cons - Dell TruMobile Wifi card is a hunk of crap, I'd avoid it. Intel is a bit better and from what I've used w/ intel, it's a good idea to take a second wifi card with that's PCMCIA as I've ran into connection issues w/ Intel on occasion, but far less than TruMobile when trying to use WPA.
When re-installing, the media button will re-partition the drive if you make it a single partition and install windows. so, I've ended up having the machine wipe itself out after I reinstalled.

Basically, if you don't use their media thing (which is a modded winxp anyway, so it's not much of a battery saver), it's fine for a laptop if you're going intel based.

I will probably go Apple for my next one, as I don't care for Vista.

I have one, it's a decent cheap laptop.

The problem with a lot of their cheaper laptops is little shit breaks. Whether it's a bad piece of RAM, fried hard drive, battery failing, something is bound to go wrong in the first year with it. They have arguably the worst support I've ever seen from a company.

So if you're really in a pinch moneywise and don't mind really slow support, it's a decent buy. But if it's your primary computer for business, I'd go with something more reliable that actually has support.

Thanks gents.

I've got a Vostro 1400, and bought my folks a Vostro 1000. They're basically just recolored, re-badged Inspirons. No better, no worse.

They're fairly cheaply built, and when I bought my 1400, it came with Vista, no other options. It was hell slipstreaming the SATA driver onto my old XP disc so I could install XP onto it, but I eventually got it working.

Although I opted for the familiar Intel 3945 wifi, it's flakier than it was in my Inspiron 6400.

All in all, it's a good cheap machine.