Dell Called It "The Showstopper"
Channel: Cathode Ray Dude [CRD]
Date: 2024-04-08

This is genuinely the best laptop I've ever seen.

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Chapters:
00:00:00 Intro
00:01:30 The Laptop Question
00:03:20 First impressions
00:14:00 Ports, slots, and accessories
00:18:35 Basic user experience
00:23:00 The Premium Remote
00:32:21 Hardware review and teardown
00:39:48 RAID problems and solutions
00:44:06 The godforsaken rubber coating
00:45:41 Hardware summary
00:46:18 Gaming performance
00:51:03 The battery issue
00:54:49 Where did this come from?
00:56:03 Premium remote deep dive
01:00:55 The curse of the concept car
01:03:15 Quick Start: Episode 3: Episode 2
01:05:14 Conclusion
01:06:22 Outro

Regarding CableCard:

This was a *huge* debacle that's still going on, but in short, the FCC mandated in the late 90s that cable TV providers allow subscribers to view TV as a raw MPEG2 stream, on a device of their choosing; Cablecard is the generally known brand name of the thing that was made to enable this. The cable companies absolutely hated it, they fought it tooth and claw to stop it, and while they technically are legally required *to this day* to support these things, they will literally lie and cheat to prevent you from using one. There are thousands of stories, it's a real mess.

I bring it up here because: In 2006, there were still laptops being sold with both Cardbus and ExpressCard slots. With all the media features of this machine, Dell absolutely would have had cablecard on their minds, I'm sure they would have wanted to provide for it, but you can't actually use one on this machine. There was never any Cablecard sold in ExpressCard format, and I have no idea why. PCI-e desktop cards got made, but no EC cards.

Dell wouldn't have known this in 2006 however; EC was still picking up steam, and they were probably certain that any minute Cablecard would be updated. They couldn't have known this would never happen, but if they did, I think they would have put both Cardbus and EC on here. Again, a completely baseless theory, but an interesting thing to think about anyway.