Generally I do not like heavy laptops. But since I have a heavy workload, and I do not have my desktop as back at home, I had to “reward myself” with a Dell XPS 13 (well ….). Dell XPS for all the features it offers, at around 2.2 kgs is a terrific machine, with desktop kind performance. So far I like this machine. Contrary to many reports around the internet about overheating, I can safely say that it gets heated as much as my HCL MiLeap, which is fairly OK… though should test how it behaves in summer. Only drawback I see currently is the Nvidia drivers that come with XPS are a bit old, and CUDA support is not great. Essentially you have to wait for Dell to upgrade their drivers as they are not available from Nvidia site. Currently though I have shifted all my primary work from MiLeap to this machine (which means I will now experiment with OS that best suites MiLeap … read “remove vista” ;-))
Currently, I have Vista dual booted with Ubuntu 9.04 on this Dell machine, though I will be upgrading this machine too to Windows 7 (along with my home desktop). So I will put in a more detailed review when I do so.
In the mean time I am deeply engrossed in writing other things up ;-) Also you could expect a new release of MeTA Studio with some interesting features in coming weeks.
(Update: As of today, 25 Sep 2009, Dell released an updated BIOS for my XPS, after this I am able to install CUDA enabled drivers directly from NVIDIA. Which is quite great :) Now I should have some fun experimenting with CUDA :D)
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