I purchased it a while ago, second hand but almost new. It then left home during my broke up, and was recently given back, with its 17" CRT. Dusty and no HDD (my ex kept her secrets), but worthed a restore; the idea was to replace the old Toshiba laptop I use for Cubase.
Cleaned up, memory boosted to 1 Gb, SSD and IDE-to-SATA converter, ready to go. I first tried Windows 7, but the lack of compatible video driver forced me to go back to XP. Well, it's a pretty good OS after all, still in use in many places.
Once all drivers set, the Dell works pretty well and quite fast. My workhorse sequencer is Cubase SX 2.2, wich was released in the same years; with 1 Gb RAM, it's large enough for my needs. Because I lack a descent audio I/O so far (I use my Novation XioSynth as I/O; I wich to purchase a friend's unused I-ONIX), I mainly use it for MIDI.
With twice the horsepower and 4 times the memory (and room to double), it's a good step ahead from my Toshiba. A good point is the 6 USB 2.0; I could bypass the use of USB hub which introduced lags and bad behaviour of my MidiTimePiece AV. Apparently, all my troubles were linked to this hub.
I also installed Native Instruments B4, but the ASIO driver yields scratches and lags; I remember having to fight with it on my Toshiba.
The worst point so far: it is not as silent as the Toshiba was, despite the SSD; the reason resides in a bigger CPU fan.
Cleaned up, memory boosted to 1 Gb, SSD and IDE-to-SATA converter, ready to go. I first tried Windows 7, but the lack of compatible video driver forced me to go back to XP. Well, it's a pretty good OS after all, still in use in many places.
Once all drivers set, the Dell works pretty well and quite fast. My workhorse sequencer is Cubase SX 2.2, wich was released in the same years; with 1 Gb RAM, it's large enough for my needs. Because I lack a descent audio I/O so far (I use my Novation XioSynth as I/O; I wich to purchase a friend's unused I-ONIX), I mainly use it for MIDI.
With twice the horsepower and 4 times the memory (and room to double), it's a good step ahead from my Toshiba. A good point is the 6 USB 2.0; I could bypass the use of USB hub which introduced lags and bad behaviour of my MidiTimePiece AV. Apparently, all my troubles were linked to this hub.
I also installed Native Instruments B4, but the ASIO driver yields scratches and lags; I remember having to fight with it on my Toshiba.
The worst point so far: it is not as silent as the Toshiba was, despite the SSD; the reason resides in a bigger CPU fan.
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