Precision M6400 Covet

Yesterday my M6400 arrived for me at work.

I waited four weeks for this.

First impression: Bright orange. My eyes!! My eyes!!
Second impression: Holy God this thing is heavy
Third impression: Ooooh... perty... and it looks like there's some
battery juice already!!
Fourth impression: Ooooh!! Backlit keyboard!!!!
From there, I appreciated the glass screen, the tactile
responsiveness of the touchpad, and the pretty blue colours as well as
the slot-loading DVD-RW.
I also began noticing that the way the touchpad was moved over to stay
centered with the alpha portion of the keyboard made it so my left
hand is dug into by the corner of the laptop. It's got quite the
square edge on it.

I brought it home and played with it some more. The PSU weighs almost
as much as my UPS does, but I discovered an unexpected benefit to
having a 10 amp psu to lug around: You can put your cold feet on it
and it's toasty warm. So I lowered my home office chair, put my feet
on the PSU, and the laptop (which is wider than me) kept my lap warm.
I was as snug as a bug in a rug with the exception of the fact the
laptop's so heavy that after a couple hours, my left knee beging to
get annoyed with my ergonomic decisions. Whups. But I didn't have
any intentions of sitting that way in the first place at work, and I
wasn't intending to use it AS a laptop most of the time. MY intention
was to let it sit in its docking station at my desk 99 percent of the
time. I might bring it home only on special occasions, or if I get
sent away for training... Yeah. Otherwise, it sits.

Anywho, I digress. Google Desktop (specifically, gadgets, although
I'm still not sure if this is Vista or Google or a combination) is
pretty cool. Windows version of the Mac's "dashboard." I like the
notepad and the tasklist the best. The weather is nice.

My laptop has 4GB of RAM and 2.54GHz core 2 duo. I ordered with Vista
Ultimate 32 bit preinstalled so I've been playing with that.

I spent three hours with it this morning trying to get the boot time
from 1m 20s to under 30s. A guy at work told me he once got his
laptop (Vista, different model laptop though) down to 17s. I clocked
my BIOS boot at between 8 and 12 seconds, probably closer to 8, so
despite a desire to beat his number I didn't hold high aspirations,
but I admit I did feel a pull to attempt it anyway. I also don't know
if he started with a clean install, or a pre-installed version.
Obviously there could be differences there. And, which version of
Vista? Business or Ultimate? So for the most part, I decided to see
what I could do on my own for my particular situation. If I happened
to beat his number, great. LOL

First and foremost, I grabbed Process Explorer and Autoruns off the
'net and began disabling the obvious crap - bloatware, etc. Over the
course of 2 hours I got it down to 48 seconds. The shutdown time was
19 seconds, mostly. Then I installed Tweak UI, which I'd never tried
before. They make it for Vista now. I used the f/w version. With
that, I got it down to only 38 seconds. But there was a problem.
Shutdown started taking 1 minute 47 seconds!! I rebooted at least
five times and kept seeing it over and over. It was relentless. So I
undid my changes by using the snapshots I'd taken. NO CHANGE. So I
used the system restore point I'd made. THAT was interesting... the
shutdown went to between 16 and 21 seconds (mostly 19 again) and yet
the boot time remained at 38 seconds. I uninstalled Tweak UI and
tried a few more times. The same.

Then I readded my touchpad and a few small items from Dell and the
numbers have not changed.

Other than poking around services and such, which I'm not familiar
with on Vista yet and don't feel like spending hours researching just
for a few more potential seconds, I'd say I'm done.

Anywho, that's all on that for now... except... I want to add that I'm
amazed at the time it takes to open IE after logging in. It takes all
of four seconds after entering your password to get to a point where
you can launch something from the QL bar. I also can launch from the
run command in maybe six seconds.

AND I discovered that it can start itself up every weekday morning for
me, too. I like that... :)

~nv