During the last episode of this soap opera, I was awaiting a replacement for my Dell Latitude d820 which became very unreliable after a couple of motherboard replacements failed to resolve an issue.

So last week, Dell shipped me a d830.  It looks very much like the d820.  The biggest difference is that it's chipset can recognize the full 4GB of installed RAM.  Only about 3.3GB of my old d820's 4GB of RAM was usable. 

To take advantage of the 4GB RAM, I installed Vista 64-bit. I thought this would be painful and full of compromises but so far, my experience has been good.  I installed the current Vista SP1 RC and things feel a lot smoother.   I used Windows Easy Transfer to migrate many of the setting and data from my d820 to the d830.  One glitch I ran into was that the PC to PC network transfer didn't work, so I had to use a migration file. 

So far, there's been no big issues.  And I hope it stays that way.   If the next few days of d830 use are smooth then I'll wipe my d820's hard drive and ship the old unit back to Dell.

 

Oh... and happy new year.