Good Enough to Take to War...

I have been stationed at Schofield Barracks, HI for about a year and a half now, however 8 months of this time has been spent in sunny, fun-filled Afghanistan. Yes, I enjoy the heat, lack of moisture in the air, the land mines, and the people that would rather cut my throat than spit on me if I was on fire, but it isn't all fun and games.

Prior to deploying from Hawaii (a place filled with all kinds of disgusting things like bars, clubs, beaches, and my beautiful wife and daughter), I begged and pleaded with my chain of command to get enough laptop computers for everyone in my section, because we always run short on laptops when we go to the field. Being a 25B (computer geek), having a laptop with 2 hard drives is a very important part of my job - I cannot correctly administer my servers from a remote site without a way to connect to it. The 2 hard drives are important because I administer both a Secret and an Unclassified network, and obviously I cannot use a computer with classified information on it on an Unclassified network - that would get me a pretty fast trip to jail, and I wouldn't get to stay in this arm-pit of a country any longer. Who would want that?

Well, to make a long story short, about a month before we left, my section became the proud owners of 15 Dell Latitude D600 laptops, with 2 hard drives each. I will start with the 2 hard drives, because these laptops have about the easiest hard drives to change that I have seen. On the left side of the computer, in the front (closest to you when sitting in front of the keyboard), the Hard drive is held into the side of the computer by only 1 small screw. This screw can be taken out and left out without affecting the laptop's operation at all. This makes it easier to swap the hard drives out. The casing on the hard drive actually plugs into the side of the computer, so you don't have to remove a panel on the bottom of the computer or anything to swap them, you just power down, pull one out, and put the other one in. I really can't make this any harder if I wanted to.

We got lucky and Dell was running a promotion and the 512 MB of RAM that the computers came with was being doubled to make 1 GB of RAM for free, so we were able to take advantage of this. Do I need it for work? No, but with this being my only computer that i have access to it makes it much better for recreational use - I haven't found any games yet that it wouldn't run, although someone told me that Unreal Tournament 2004 doesn't run on their D600, but I can neither confirm nor deny these allegations.

There is 32 MB of video RAM on an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 AGP video card, which is not too shabby at all in a laptop. A lot of laptops only use shared system memory, but this one is a step ahead of the other yahoo's.

The processor in these models is a 1.7 GHz Pentium M. Nothing I use for work comes close to taxing this processor either, although I do notice a little difference between my work computer and my buddy's Alienware that he bought while we were here. Of course, there will be no comparison here, the Alienware will naturally spank the Dell's on every single level.

There are different size and speed hard drives available for the D600's, but the ones we are using are 5400 RPM and are 40 GB in size. Not too shabby, I loaded mine up with about 20 GB of music before we left and I have no complaints when it comes to the hard drives.

I also, umm, acquired a third hard drive for my laptop (if it ain't got a name, it ain't got a claim, as they say...) and I loaded Red Hat Linux 9.0 on this 3rd hard drive that I do not use for work. The drivers for everything installed on the computer were included in the 9.0 release of Red Hat and I have had no problems with it at all. I was expecting to have to go download drivers for 3 days straight (I download at a whopping 1kb/s on average), but I ran the install, and everything came right up.

The LCD screen is a little smaller than the Dell D800's (which some of the other units here are using), but I mean come on, this is supposed to be a portable computer, where do you draw the line when it comes to screen size? I mean sure, it looks better for movies and video games, but at the cost of portability. I am more than content with the size of the screen on the D600.

The biggest advantage of buying a Dell, however, is not the outstanding performance of their machines, because most of the laptops you can buy for $2k will run great. The best thing Dell has to offer is outstanding customer support. When I worked for Sony several years ago, we used to see the customer service rankings, and Dell was almost always at #1. I have had to call Dell Support to replace Hard Drives that have burned out and things like this (hmm...computer parts breaking in a desert, go figure...), and they are always very nice and accommodating. When a hard drive burns up, they send us a new one immediately and we just send them the old one in the box from the new one. They have been a great help, and are available 24 hours a day, which is nice considering I can never keep track of time zones anymore with my family in Hawaii and the rest of my family still living in Florida.

Considering the beating that we put on these computers, they stand up to the elements very well. I would definitely recommend this system to anyone, whether they jump out of airplanes with people shooting at them or if they work in an office where their major hazard is paper cuts.