Dell D500

[Thermo]

Well, we are starting to deploy some Dell D500 laptops here. PIIIm at 1.3GHz and 128megs of ram. Must say that after a half a day with one, I am not impressed at all. First thing I did was pull some updates off of the SUS server. It took forever to install them. I just did a batch of 2.4GHs towers last week and they did the same installs in a few minutes. I thing the accountants cut this spec back a little too far, when they trimmed the original order.

[doctor15]

umm... those are really old machines without very good specs.

and are you saying that they are brand new and only have a pentium 3.

[SkyDog]

A PIII may not be a speed demon, but it's not a total dog, either. But considering that newer P4 or P-M options aren't much more expensive, why would anyone get a PIII nowadays? 128 MB RAM on a new machine is inexcusable, though. Yeah, I'd say they cut some corners.

I don't have all the details, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but aren't accountants supposed to be good with money? Wouldn't they realize that spending more now to get a faster machine with more RAM would be cheaper in the long run? It would increase productivity over the entire life of the machine, and the computer would have a longer life before obsolescense.

[Thermo]

They just took an order for 120 machines and made it fit the amount of money they had to spend. They should have gone with desk top units for at least half of this order. And as we speak, there is about to be a decision made to take the executive staff off of Citrix and put them on local apps with sever based apps being delivered through the browser. That will make 120 new in the box lap tops obsolete. So they will get handed down to support staff and in six months half of them will have gone missing.

[Thermo]

It gets worse…………………..When docked, the system reacts as if it is on battery and drops back to <600MHz.

[VTboy]

The P3M on the D500 is not possible, it must have the Pentium M and those are plenty fast. A 1.3Ghz Pentium M is very fast. You can go into windows and change power setting to Always On.

Though only 128 MB of ram would make it very slow I think. That is probably your problem, the lack of memory.

[KegCanMan]

Originally posted by Thermo
Well, we are starting to deploy some Dell D500 laptops here. PIIIm at 1.3GHz and 128megs of ram. Must say that after a half a day with one, I am not impressed at all. First thing I did was pull some updates off of the SUS server. It took forever to install them. I just did a batch of 2.4GHs towers last week and they did the same installs in a few minutes. I thing the accountants cut this spec back a little too far, when they trimmed the original order.
The Dell D500's are actually the P-M chips, not PIII-M chips. I think the performance bottleneck is the lack of ram. 128 is intolerable. I have 256 and its barely adequate. Fire whoever ordered them with that. 128-256mb more ram would have ran the "accountant" no more than $20-$50 a machine.(if ordered from a third party, $50-$100 if ordered from dell) The 1.3ghz P-M chips should run nearly equivalent to a P4 1.5-1.6ghz.