Dell finally ships my Win 7 Upgrade DVD

After being told that my Dell Win 7 Upgrade DVD wouldn’t be shipped until around Nov 22nd, I just got an email confirming that Dell did ship out the upgrade this morning.

I have a UPS tracking number, but it apparently isn’t registered in the UPS system yet so I don’t know when the upgrade will be delivered. I’m actually getting two shipments (one for my Dell 11z and the other for my Son’s Dell Inspiron 15) so Dell may be processing all the registered requests pretty quickly now.

For those waiting for their upgrades, good luck. My next project, will be figuring out how to install Win 7 from a USB drive since I don’t have an external DVD-ROM drive available to use with my Dell 11z.

Dell delays my Win 7 Upgrade shipment

I just check the status of my Windows 7 OS Upgrade shipment, and Dell has moved the estimated shipping date out from November 7th to November 22nd. Ugh. I’m not sure what is going on with Dell these days.

Did they run out of DVDs, or do they not have the necessary drivers for the Dell 11z model figured out? Maybe customers are reporting major issues with running Windows 7 on their 11z (if they even have Win 7 installed by Dell on their machines)?

So much for the “buy now and we’ll ship your 11z with Windows 7 preinstalled” false advertisement. I really wish I had made a screenshot of their web page ad stating this so I could throw it back in Dell’s face to complain about it. I could probably just get the Windows 7 Family 3-Pack and install it today and not wait for Dell’s BS.

My first field trip with the Dell 11z

Today I’m traveling to Bremerton Island to visit a customer, so I decided to leave my giant Dell Precision M4400 laptop at home and take my new Dell 11z along with me. I’m only doing a Powerpoint presentation on this day trip so I don’t need to use my mega work laptop. As such, I’m taking my Dell 11z on its first field trip.

From Seattle I take the Ferry over to Bremerton which is about an 1 hour ride. During the journey,  I proceeded to the passenger deck and settle in at a table with my new Dell 11z out and ready. The ship has WiFi provided by Boingo, however I don’t have a Boingo account so I can’t utilize it. I do have my Verizon USB Broadband adapter, but in this case I really don’t need to be connected to the Internet.

Instead, I’ve got the WiFi turned off and I’m typing this blog in my Evernote application locally on my 11z. Note, that with WiFi turned off my Vista system showed 3 hours of battery life, which isn’t too shabby.

Now, I’m a stickler for being able to see a lot of content on the screen vertically, and with most Netbooks that have a 600 pixel vertical resolution that really is bothersome to me. In fact, I returned a Dell Mini 9 several months ago for that very reason. I’m happy to say that the 1366 x 768 resolution of my 11z works just fine. Especially when I fine tune FireFox to hide the top menubar. And again, the nearly full-sized keyboard is wonderful, and as a touch typist it works great.

The compact size of the 11z makes it a very welcomed travel companion. The only thing I’m missing is a DVD drive, but that isn’t a big deal since I normally don’t use one on a routine basis. If I ever wanted to watch movies or videos, I could certainly rip the video from a DVD to my PC and convert it to WMV or MP4 format (lessons I’ve learned for my Zune HD media player).

After getting off the ship in Bremerton, I have about an hour to kill before my customer visit so I stopped in at the local Starbucks for a small coffee. While there, I pulled out my 11z and tried to connect to the WiFi available at Starbucks (through AT&T). Fortunately, I can get 2 hours of free WiFi access because I have a registered Starbucks gift card. I highly recommend travelers to getting such a gift card, as it doesn’t cost you anything (other than the amount you put on the card) and it gives you free WiFi access at most Starbucks stores.

With the Starbucks WiFi connection, I do a quick speed test (using www.speedtest.net) and get the following results:

Don’t you just love free WiFi? While connected, I fire up Evernote on my 11z and do a quick syncing to save all the notes I’ve type in while on the Ferry ride (just in case). Evernote is a great place to place all my ideas that I can access later on my PC, and I highly recommend using it for note takers.

Carrying the 11z around in my travel bag is certainly nicer than the 10+ lbs Dell M4400 laptop. I’ll need to get a smaller travel bag that can hold my Dell 11z, its power cord, mouse, small notebook, and a few other minor accessories. Maybe a nice messenger bag of some sort. One thing I will look into, is getting an extra 3-cell battery pack. I could have ordered the 6-cell battery when I originally bought my 11z, but the battery just seemed too bulky and angled the keyboard up too high for my taste. An extra 3-cell battery would give me another 2.5 hours or so of power, so that should be long enough to be untethered from an AC outlet.

So, that was my first outing with my Dell 11z. It worked out well, and I very much appreciated the reduced weight in comparison to my usual Dell M4400 companion. This netbook would be the prefect machine for a traveling business person, except that it doesn’t have a VGA video port (which is necessary for Powerpoint presentations on most video projectors). A HDMI-to-VGA cable is a must for such a task (I wonder if Dell sells one?).

Wireless broadband speed test with the Dell 11z

For my work laptop I have a Verizon Wireless USB Broadband adapter which I can use to connect to the Internet using a cellular connection. Its come in handy when I’m at a remote location (say, in my car on the side of the road or in a small airport) and I want to check my email or look up an airline flight schedule. With all the available free WiFi these days, I’ve had to use this cellular adapter less and less often in my travels.

As a kick, I decided to test out the Verizon broadband adapter with my Dell 11z Netbook. So I loaded the Verizon Wireless Manager software, then inserted the USB device to make a wireless cellular connection. The web browser response time was reasonable, seeming much faster than a standard 56k Modem (remember those?). For an unofficial speed test, I went to www.speedtest.net and ran a test connecting to a local server in the Seattle area. Below is what the results were using the cellular wireless adapter on my Dell 11z:

I guess “Cellco Partnership” is the name of the cell tower service provider that Verizon is using in my area. As you can see, the download and upload speeds aren’t tremendously fast, but acceptable. I was able to attain 0.69 Mbps download, and 0.33 Mbps upload.

In comparison, here’s what I was able to get using my home desktop PC connected via a Comcast high-speed cable connection:

Here, I’m getting 25.52 Mbps download and 7.44 Mbps upload speeds which is great. I can remember not too long ago getting 1 Mbps download speed from a cable connection (and being happy with that), so the 25.52 Mbps isn’t something I can complain about!

WiFi is great, but in a pinch a cellular wireless connection isn’t too bad.

Netbook accessories are huge!

I’m using a Logitech V450 Nano wireless mouse with my Dell 11z Netbook, since the USB transceiver is so small and unobtrusive. I leave it permanently connected to a USB port in the 11z and just forget about it. However, with the 11z netbook being so small and thin, it makes my Logitech mouse seem huge! I’ve got the thin netbook in one hand (carrying it like a thin book), and my mouse in my other hand which feels like I’m carrying a rock. I know there’s probably smaller mice I can get, but most of them have a much larger USB dongle transceiver. My other option is to get a Bluetooth Mouse (with no dongle), but I’ve read that these mice often have a slight delay since they need to be woken up after a period of inactivity. Nothing is perfect, I guess.

Informal battery test of Dell 11z Netbook

After fully charging my Dell 11z Netbook (with a 3-cell stock battery) I ran it on battery power with full screen brightness and the WiFi Adapter card continuously activated. Below is a graph showing the elapsed time verses the reported time:

So with these “extreme” settings I can get about 2.5 hours of use from the 11z on battery power. Now, I probably would get more battery time if I reduced the screen brightness a few notches and/or didn’t use the WiFi adapter, so I’ll need to do a bit more testing to see what I can get.

Automated software installation utility

I’ve solved my problem with having to install all my favorite applications twice on my Dell 11z netbook (once under the existing Vista OS and a 2nd time under Windows 7 when I do a clean install in about 10 days from now). It’s a wonderful automatic installer application called Ninite, which completely automates the installation process of several different applications. I describe this utility on my main tech blog site, so you can get more details from there.

Dell 11z: First impressions – Part 2

Now that I’ve gotten the whole Windows 7 OS issue off my chest (see previous posting), I’ll give you my quick review of the Dell 11z hardware.  Note, that I’ve only used the 11z for about 2 hours so this will be less of a review and more of a comparison with the Acer AO751h 11.6″ Netbook that I examined a few weeks ago.

First, the 11z is a very nice looking netbook. It looks like a regular Dell laptop, very clean lines and nothing outrageous or fancy (which is a good thing). I do like the fact that the keyboard is nearly full-sized (92% of normal), and being a touch typist I can very comfortably type on it. I don’t think anyone will complain about the keys being too close or too small with the 11z. The keys themselves seemed a little “clicky” when I first started typing on it, noticeably different from my Dell Precision work laptop. At first it sort of bugged me, but after typing on it for a while, I began to get use to it. So, I don’t think the keyboard springiness will be an issue for me.

The only light indicator on the 11z is for power, so you don’t have any indication of disk drive activity or if the caps key is on or off. There is, however, a small utility running in the background that pop up a small bubble window that says “CAPS LOCK: OFF” or “CAP LOCK: ON” when you hit the caps key, and that seems to be sufficient.

So far as ports, the 11z has three USB ports, a power adapter port, headphone and microphone jack, SD/MMC Card slot, CAT5 Network Jack, and a HDMI video port. Absent is a VGA port, which means I can’t use the 11z as-is with video projection machines. I’ll probably need an HDMI-VGA adapter (if such a thing exists).

The touch pad seems to work ok, although I’m primarily using a wireless mouse with the 11z. As such, I’m tying up one of the three USB ports with the Logitech Nano Receiver.

The netbook itself is very compact and easy to carry around. It’s reasonably thin, and lends itself to be toted along on trips to the coffeeshop over bulkier laptops.

The best feature of the 11z is the beautiful high-resolution screen. It measures 11.6 inches diagonally and is wide-screen format, and is extremely clear and bright. Since you spend most of your time staring at the screen, having a crisp display is very important.

Dell 11z: First impressions – Part I

I finally got my Dell Inspirion 11z laptop (or netbook, by my standards) and here’s my quick review.

First, I was disappointed that my 11z didn’t have the Windows 7 OS pre-installed as advertised on the Dell web site when I ordered it. From what I can remember, Dell stated any machines shipped after Oct 22nd (release date for Windows 7) will have the Windows 7 OS pre-installed. This was for machines that were eligible for the free Win 7 upgrade (which my 11z was), but my machine arrived with Windows Vista installed instead.

As such, I promptly called Dell post-sales customer support to get some answers. When I voiced my complaint to the Dell support rep, he kept telling me that I needed to go to the Dell Windows 7 upgrade web page and register for the upgrade to be sent to me via delivery mail. He never confirmed or denied that my machine should or shouldn’t have had the Windows 7 pre-installed as Dell advertised a few weeks ago. Since there wasn’t much he could do to help me, I hung up and tried to register on the Dell Windows 7 upgrade site as he suggested. Unfortunately, the all-important Service Tag number (located on the bottom of my 11z) wasn’t registered in the Dell database and as such my 11z couldn’t be verified for the upgrade!

So I put in another call to Dell support asking about this issue. When I asked about the Windows 7 OS pre-installed issue again, the support rep stated I was mistaken on what I read on their web site. Now, I might have been mistaken, but most likely not since that was the main reason why I ordered the Dell 11z. I knew that I wanted Windows 7 installed, because I didn’t want the hassle of installing Windows 7 over Vista and then having to reinstall all my applications. I’m kicking myself for not saving a screenshot of that Dell advertisement, but then again there’s not much Dell can do about correcting that issue at this moment. The scuttlebutt on the different user forums is that Dell didn’t have their OEM Win 7 DVDs ready in time, so that is why they didn’t ship their PC and laptops with Win 7 pre-installed. I can certainly believe those rumors, as that would explain why I didn’t get my 11z with Win 7.

As such, my only recourse was to jump through the hoops and order the Win 7 upgrade from Dell’s site. So I registered for the Win 7 upgrade for both my Dell 11z and my son’s  Inspiron 15 (which I bought him two months ago) and now it’s a waiting game. Will it take a few days, a week, two weeks, a month…. to arrive? I don’t know.

What I do know, is that this experience was a bad start in my initial evaluation of my new Dell 11z. Instead of being excited about using and exploring my new netbook, I’m utterly disappointed that I’ll need to wait until the Win 7 DVD arrives from Dell before I can really use it. The reason being, I don’t want to install all my files and applications under the Vista OS and have to reinstall everything again shortly after I install Windows 7. Of course, I could do an in-place installation which would preserve my files an applications, but I’ve always had issues with doing that, and a clean install is really the most trouble-free method of upgrading the OS (in my opinion).

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Update: I registered for the Win 7 Upgrade from Dell this afternoon, and the estimated shipping date is Nov 7th. So it will be about 10 days or so before I can get Win 7 installed on my Dell 11z netbook and really start using it.

 

My Dell 11z has shipped…

I got notice that my Dell 11z has shipped, and I should be receiving it this Weds. In preparation, I already have my neoprene slip cover and external USB Slim CD-ROM drive ready to go. I’m crossing my fingers that it arrives undamaged and free of defects.

Once it arrives, I plan to tweak the Windows 7 OS for better performance, then begin installing my standard suite of applications (e.g., Office 2007, Java, Eclipse IDE, Visual Studio 2005, FireFox, Paint.net, Palm WebOS SDK, Windows Mobile SDK, Safari Browser, Apache Server, Notepad++, and more).

After using the 11z for a bit, I’ll post my initial impressions. I’ll also run some basic battery tests and will present my findings in some upcoming posting.