Dell Precision M90 Review

At approximately 4pm a few weeks ago my doorbell rang sweetly and the nice DHL man handed me my latest prized possession…a new Dell Precision Workstation M90 laptop! Adobe and Dell gave us this unit to test on Same Day Edits and we received it the day before another Same Day Edit, so the timing was perfect. This laptop is replacing a 2 year old Sony Vaio with a 15” display.

My initial impression was…man this baby is BIG!! The screen is sharp and the extra space the 17” widescreen has over the 15” standard screen is really amazing. I knew right away that I wasn’t going to have to squint at the screen like I had been with the old laptop. I was surprised to find that it weighed almost the exact same as the 15”. And anyone who knows me, or has been to one of my Same Day Edit presentations, knows that I like to travel as light as possible. So I was pleased.

My new baby is an Intel 1.66Ghz Dual Core with 2GB RAM, a 60GB 7200RPM hard drive, a beautiful 17” wide screen (1440 x 900) WUXGA display and an Nvidia 512MB display card. It came fully loaded with the Adobe Production Suite Premium. Unfortunately all that software also took up half the hard disk space, but for Same Day Edits, I really don’t need too much anyway. I’m sure I can replace it with a larger drive if I need to. I was pleased to see that Premiere Pro 2.0 loaded almost as quickly as on my new AMD 2.6Ghz Dual Core desktop! Sweet!

The keyboard is laid out nicely and has a good feel to it. My old Sony Vaio literally has the ink rubbed off many of the keys so it’s nice to see which keys are supposed to be what letter again!

The battery life is great…almost 2 hours of constant use. The audio quality is also much better than any other laptop I’ve seen with volume controls (and DVD player controls) on the front panel of the machine. That comes in very handy if you are showing work and need to turn the volume up or down if you are talking with a prospect. I actually gave a short presentation in the middle of a busy shopping mall food court and the couple was able to see and hear the videos well enough that they booked our top package. DVD’s play beautifully with both 4:3 and 16:9 videos.

So on to the next day’s Same Day Edit. This wedding ceremony was going to be at the couple’s private residence for 40 people with a reception immediately following at a different location for 200 guests. A cool situation for a Same Day Edit. So I decided to put the new laptop to the test.

I pre-loaded a timeline into Premiere with the song and opening titles. Since the wedding was taking place at a private residence, I had no “stock” footage to place on the timeline ahead of time. This was also a 5 minute Same Day Edit (normally ours are about 3-4 minutes), so I knew I had a challenge ahead of me. Also, we did not have a third person to help with shooting at the reception, and we had two locations to deal with. Another challenge was going to be that my Firestore drive was in for service so I had to capture all the footage by tape. I was really looking forward to pulling this one off!

We arrived at the groom’s house where thankfully both the bride and groom were getting ready. I filmed the bridal prep while Chris shot the groom getting ready. Chris also obtained shots of the front of the house, the view (which was amazing!) and the ceremony setup (which was pretty simple). This bride and groom did not see each other prior to the ceremony so the bulk of the video would be focused on the ceremony itself.

While there were short breaks prior to the ceremony either Chris or myself would run out to the van (there was NO WHERE to work at this house!) and capture footage. Capturing on the Dell M90 went very smoothly with no problems. By the time the ceremony started, I had the first half of the Same Day Edit video completed. No crashes, no issues. I was jazzed!

The ceremony was shot with three cameras…two manned and one static. Unfortunately the photographer we were working with seemed to get into every angle as the bride was walking down the aisle. So I knew even before I saw the footage that he would be an integral part of their Same Day Edit. Oh well!

Immediately after the ceremony I headed back to the van and began capturing my full ceremony tape and then pulled clips out from the other two cameras. By the time we arrived at the reception location, I was done capturing and had synced up the vows. I had an hour left to complete the second half of the video.

At the reception location I had to sit in an uncomfortable chair in the lobby while using another chair as my ‘table’. Thankfully I had an outlet nearby so I could operate on AC power. Editing was going really smoothly. Not one crash and no glitches whatsoever. The footage was great (thank goodness for polarizing filters because there were no clouds in the sky that day for this outdoor ceremony).

When showed the Same Day Edit I looked around the room and saw everyone crying.
We received a standing ovation, and the wedding coordinator said “Wow, that was the best one yet!” I love my job!!

In summary, I am thrilled to have this new Dell laptop! It’s a tremendous improvement over lugging around one of our tower systems or using a two year old slower than mud laptop for our Same Day Edits. It is very reliable and just as powerful as a desktop. It’s truly an amazing little machine!