Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist of the Dell Laptop Battery
I find it is amazing how quick people see something nice said about something new, and quickly have to take exception to those words to defend the purchase decisions they have made.
To illustrate my point you have only to look at some of the previous posts. The tail is once again giving the dog a good shaking! The previous post only proves the point that once again AVID is either making everybody play their tune by requiring you to have an onboard firewire port, or shipping a ill conceived or even dare I say it, flawed product. Is it flawed? I doubt it, read on thru before you choke on your Milk Duds.
The fact that Avid is incompatible with an industry standard (PCMCIA) that has been around for close to ten years now is somewhat amazing. Amazing in that they just kinda FORGOT to support a significant portion of the market. Why would with battery like Dell Latitude D420 Battery , Dell Latitude D430 Battery , Dell Latitude D500 Battery , Dell Latitude D505 Battery , Dell Latitude D510 Battery , Dell Latitude D520 Battery , Dell Latitude D531 Battery , Dell Latitude D531N Battery , Dell Latitude D600 Battery , Dell Latitude D610 Battery , Dell Latitude D620 Battery , Dell Latitude D800 Battery they do that you ask? I mean they really are not forgetful types who don't know how to look at the market are they? No they are not. They are smart dedicated and hard working professional people just like you and I and yet�..
This is a classic example of why I would rather take a job digging ditches than edit with AVID products, and that is market manipulation. The fact they work so well with APPLE products is that AVID was started as collaboration between Apple and Sony, so it stands to reason that anybody that has been with AVID for any significant period would get on the Apple bandwagon or hit the highway.
Now before anyone starts getting their panties in a twist, I am not saying Avid is a bad product or that it is actually flawed. But when your software won't work on a major portion of the worlds notebook PC's because you don't support Firewire via PCMCIA, don't you have to wonder why that is? Maybe, just maybe it is because certain people have a STAKE in how well APPLE does?
As for the Acer Aspire 1800 user, I am happy to hear that the system you using works for your application. But, having had the displeasure of dealing with Acer tech support in the past keeps them from any application that would significantly affect my productivity, let alone my bottom line. Perhaps they have improved... I mean they are still in business.... but I have more than one paperweight with their name on it and don't plan on expanding my collection.
Again before you go all verbally postal on me, I truly am glad it works for your application, but if you put the two machines side by side, I suspect that the Dell would be quite a bit faster, probably more reliable, and run cooler.
With regard to price, well as we all know, when you adopt early, you pay thru the nose, but another truth is you get what you pay for. Running a P4 in a laptop is a cooling nightmare, that is why you have that noisy fan, and a battery life probably measured in minutes.
Acer is a value oriented manufacturer, with a reputation for low cost products, which is a great fit for their market segment. They are not known for great performance or fantastic reliability, things that are crucial in video editing and other high performance applications. They remove features and performance to cut costs. Yes a Yugo or Kia will get you to your destination, but so will a Lexus or a Mercedes. If my job depends on delivering a product to a client on time and on budget, I tend to find reliability and stability more reassuring than a little change rattling around in my pocket. (And what would my client say if I rolled up in a Yugo sporting an ACER?)
In summation, it is all in how you look at it....
Some people think Dell screwed up by omitting an onboard firewire port. A port that might be used by generously, maybe 30% or 40% of it�s customers. Of that number, how many of them would be editing on Avid?
Conversely, I think that is a smart move on the part of Dell because they are not adding the cost of firewire to the already expensive computer for the 60+ % of users who don't need it. For those who do need firewire, they can buy a PCMCIA card (with probably newer chips and firmware), and as long as they don't make the mistake of trying to run AVID on it, (sorry couldn't resist) they will quite possibly be better off.
So is the glass half full or half empty? It is your call, but if you want tea, put the glass on a P4 laptop and jam a paperclip in the fan.