Traveling with the laptop

Last weeks trip to the USA was my first big trip with the new Dell XPS M1210 laptop. I used to travel with a 15.1" medium-sized laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000), which was still rather bulky and heavy to lug around. The new 12" laptop was a lot easier to handle and lighter to carry. And the 3" less screen diagonal make surprisingly little difference for working and playing.

The new laptop has more RAM, a much faster CPU, and a better graphics card, resulting in a 3DMark05 score of just over 2000, more than twice as good as the previous laptop. That means that World of Warcraft runs perfectly without me having to turn down the graphics settings. And it turns out that running WoW over a hotel room internet access isn't a problem, although that probably depends on the quality of your hotel's internet access. In fact, as I was playing the Burning Crusade beta, it turned out that the European beta servers are actually in the US, and my latency was lower in an US hotel room than at home in Europe.

The only thing that wasn't working was watching DVDs on my new laptop, they were stuttering in both video and audio. Hey, didn't I have that same problem before on my old laptop? Unfortunately, while the symptoms were very similar, the solution wasn't the same. The IDE channel was well set to DMA, not PIO. So I started trying to fix it in other ways. I installed new video and audio drivers. I uninstalled the Dell Media Experience and installed another DVD player with another DVD codec. I searched for new drivers for the DVD drive, but couldn't find any. Nothing helped. The troubleshooting wizard on the Dell site suggested "trying with a known good drive", but where would I get a known good drive on a business trip?

Back home I still had the old laptop (I plan to give it away for christmas), so that one has a known good drive. I found out how to remove drives on a laptop, which is remarkably easy, they are held with just one screw and then slide out and in. But the known good drive, while looking the same size as the not working one, somehow had a slightly larger front panel. While I was able to fit it into the new laptop, the tray was stuck and wouldn't open. So I did the next best thing, and tried the non-working drive on the old laptop. Surprise, surprise, it worked. So I put it back into the new laptop, and even greater surprise, now its working.

I'm not quite sure how switching the drives and then switching them back did fix the problem. But I have two theories: Either the problem was the DVD drive not being plugged in perfectly. When removing it and putting it back, I somehow managed to plug it in better, so now it works. Or, second theory, by switching the drives and turning the laptops on, Windows Plug&Play reinstalled the drivers for the DVD drive, and that was all it needed. No wonder people also call it Plug&Pray.

Anyway, now I have a perfectly working new laptop, which is lighter, easier to transport, more powerful, and does everything I want. I'm quite satisfied. I just wish sometimes I knew more about fixing computers. I usually manage to fix the problem somehow, but that is on a trial and error basis. My desktop PC still has the odd blue screen crash once in a blue moon, and sometimes fails to start. But as the problem only happens rarely, and isn't reproducible, fixing it is very hard.