My new Dell XPS 15

I’m really enjoying my new laptop. About a month ago I splurged and upgraded to the Dell XPS 15 9570.  It has the 8th Gen 6 core i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD and Nvidia GTX 1050 TI. So far I’ve only been running Windows but I might make it dual boot later.

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I’m running on the latest preview builds of Windows and its been pretty fun.  This Dell has everything I would need to code almost just about everything.

With the GTX, I decided to add some games and the Unity developer tools on it.  It’s doing quite well.  It a really good gamer compared to other laptops that I’ve owned.

One thing that I downgraded was the monitor.  I didn’t appreciate the glossy high res touch display on my XPS 13.  I actually prefer to code on this matte finish, non-touch, HD display.  1080 is fine and I don’t need the 4k.  It has been said that I’ll get better battery life with this set up also.

When I’m presenting, 4k doesn’t help all that much either.  Most conferences barely have HD projectors.  So at a lower resolution, maybe I’ll be using ZoomIt less.

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I recently let my XPS 13 from 2015 go to my son.  He loves the form factor of the XPS 13 and it’s still plenty fast.  The battery doesn’t last as many hours as it used to but it’s good for him. 

The XPS 13 is much lighter than the 15 but the 15 is much lighter than a Latitude.  For you Apple Fans, think of the 13 as a MacBook Air and the 15 as a MacBook Pro.


Note to Pros:

Some developers use their work issued laptop for personal computing.  I don’t do that.  If company policy states that it is to be used for business purposes only, I don’t mess with it.  Owning my own computer, I also get to experiment and run preview builds of operating systems or other tools.  I won’t be risking downtime and my career because of running too close to the bleeding edge.

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