Arrival and First Impressions

When we received our new (for us) notebook, I examined the computer to figure out what made it "Scratch and Dent" on the Dell Outlet website. The only thing that I could find is that it had a "Vista Home" sticker, when it really had Widows Vista Business installed on it. There was nothing else visibly wrong with the notebook computer.

I started it up and was soon playing with the new operating system and getting a feel for the laptop. The Dell Latitude D820 is a really nice computer (D820 sheet). It has a large screen and a full size keyboard. I did notice that the 1 GB of RAM that the computer came with was being utilized over 50% with nothing but Windows running (well, maybe the anti-virus software too (Trend Micro)). So, make sure you get 2GB of RAM if your getting any of the Vista OS flavors except for Home Basic.

As for the Vista operating system. It was cool, but after a few days of playing with the interface, I switched it to "Classic" mode, which I was more familiar with.

I like to have Google as my home page, it is the search engine I use most frequently. At some point during the first few days (maybe the first day, I don't remember) I noticed an issue with the display when I did a Google search on a subject. Specifically, when you search with Google, the first few returned hits are usually "Sponsored Links" that have a light yellow or beige background to differentiate them from the rest of the search results. When you looked at the notebook display perpendicularly, you couldn't see the beige background, but when you tilted the display back about 15 to 12-degrees, you could see the colors. When I hooked up an external LCD display, this wasn't a problem.

Well, this wasn't a major problem, and the display on this particular laptop was the cheapest of the 3 available (15.4" WXGA (1280 X 800 resolution)), so I figured this was standard for this particular display. I didn't contact Dell customer service about this issue. Little did I know how this would later become a major problem.