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SvennoJ on 24 October 2015
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Loosely related I recently got my wife a new laptop as the old windows 7 one had too many issues. It was on sale for CAD 869 ($660) and although bestbuy is not my favorite, using credit card points to get a laptop is a bonus. It looks very good so far. Yet it still took about 10 hours to get it up and running decent enough.

First one that arrived turned out to be a lemon. After initial language setup and being forced to set up a microsoft account, it would not boot up windows. Just a black screen with a mouse pointer. Forcing a restart initiated the repair mode with the same effect, sometimes not even getting past the Dell logo, one time actually getting as far as initiating win 8 repair mode. I guess the HDD was doa. Although I had to drive to the next town, it was easy enough to get a replacement right away. Still almost 4 hours wasted. Anyway it can happen with anything.

The second one works flawlessly. Windows 8.1 was still a bit of a hassle though. Many little things, like all file explorer windows etc being blurry (global windows scaling set to 125% out of the box), a twitchy track pad, annoying ambient light sensor, default programs all pointing to annoying app versions. (Why can't it simply start the desktop equivalent when you're on the desktop...) Anyway with google at the ready everything could be solved easily enough. Don't forget to opt out of all the 'MS looks over your shoulder while typing' stuff and I disconnected the MS account again so you can turn it on without the password check all the time. It wouldn't connect to my homegroup initially, yet after a reboot it could access it in a roundabout way. (win 7 server with all my backup data) Homegroup still gives me, "ask your administrator for permission" nonsense. Moving on to 104 critical patches and 16 optional. That took a few hours and a bunch of reboots before it was up to date. Updates from Dell too of course.

On a plus point, not a lot of bloatware on a Dell laptop nowadays (or they hide it well) Quite a difference with the previous Toshiba laptop where I had to uninstall a whole list of bloatware. More programs to install, abobe reader, excell + word viewer (don't feel like paying $100 a year for Office 365, don't need the latest word/excell for writing) and all the programs my wife uses.


Initial experience:

My wife decided to give internet explorer another try. It seemed to work fine now, although pretty annoying in tablet mode. She was on facebook, the virtual keyboard goes over the message windows so you can't see what you're typing. And for some reason anything you touch to give focus keeps resizing, zooming in and out. Back to laptop mode.
Then the mouse cursor went beserk, flickering between and hand and cursor on an internet explorer window. According to Google it might be some other window that didn't close correctly. We thought it had gone away but yesterday morning the whole window went beserk. Flickering like crazy while using Facebook. She switched back to Firefox which has run flawlessly since.

Very nice laptop overall, great screen, night and day difference with the old Toshiba laptop. It's not for gaming, no clue how the integrated graphics perform. Yet even if it was, the out-of-the-box experience wouldn't be much different. Compared to being up and running on a new ps4 in a few minutes, pc's still have some way to go.