YO!

I've spent most of the week in the company of a Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook and I must say I was impressed with the power of such a small Air rip off machine. Packing a 1.7GhZ i7 it does NOT lack grunt but I feel the whole affair was let down by the way Dell have pretty much locked this down to x64. In our work environment we don't really deal with 64-bit Windows much so we generally go with the safe option and bung on Professional X86.

RAM is more than enough for general users although for a pre-loaded 64bit OS I would have thought Dell would shove 8GB in there, well, for the price anyway. These little monsters aren't exactly fuckin' cheap.

Still cheaper than a Mac, granted, but I love my little fruity buddy.

I'm constantly impressed with the SSD performance though, it's nippy as fuck. Doesn't like the Dell STD SSD drivers when clean installing windows to obliterate Dell's shitty bloatware and useless partitions.

Honestly, Dell, Just put a fuckin' disk in the box. It takes less time and you have happy customers.

The dude on the phone when I asked for the correct drivers. What a waste of space. I gave up and fixed it myself ;).

He was DEFINITELY not giving me the helpings.

All this aside we've managed to successfully install and image this machine. At least that's what we thought before we TRIED to image it. 2x USB with only 1 of them being USB 2 and therefore comlpliant with my devices and no NIC.

Tried imaging using WIFI, no. EXT drive? NO Can't power EXT drive AND DVD / USB Memstick.

If they had a PXE compliant NIC I'd be bumming them to high heaven. Reality is, if you're going to order machines for an enterprise environment this is NOT the machine to go for.

No NIC = No deal. It's just a waste of your IT department's time. Trust me, I've wasted ages on this.

Overall, decent machines. Get them for home use, personal  use. Don't  push for one at work. Your IT department will NOT thank you.

As usual,
I've said too much, they're on to me. Silence!

Peace,
Smurf.