Product Uses: "office" email & net browsing, statistics work r & other s'ware, qualitative s'ware atlas/ti & other, programming & data/file handling

Review:Our Trust buys only Dell and I've had a succession of Dell laptops over the last eight years. I'm a power user who is on the move a lot and uses the machine for internet by various routes, mainstream office uses but also statistics and a wide variety of specialist purposes with commercial and FLOSS s'ware.

This machine has been a very poor performer: it seems very slow for so much power, it feels heavy but not very strong, it marked and scuffed in days, the DVD-R/W has been hopelessly unreliable, the trackpad has that tragically common hypersensitivity that sends the cursor leaping around even when the pad wasn't touched, so much so that I have to use the machine with a separate keyboard whenever I can and curse when using numbers when on the main keyboard. I think it's a driver problem and may not be the pad itself as it's worse in some s'ware than others I'm pretty sure. Battery life isn't great and is falling off fast already. All in all, I think Dell took a very bad wrong turn with this and need to rethink radically.