My old laptop was getting a bit long in the tooth and taking longer and longer so I decided it was time to purchase a shiny new one.

After some deliberation and the chance to look at and play with one I decided on the Dell XPS 13. Initial impressions are very good, feels solid, nice screen, good size, lightweight. Everything you’d be looking for in a laptop these days.

It came with the usual bloatware pre-installed though McAfee 30day trial, Office starter edition and Skype. So I removed all those, installed the standard stuff I need, putty, notepad++, winscp and even trialing Microsoft Security Essentials after hearing some good things recently. In the end was up and running in a bit over an hour, not too shabby at all.

The first thing I did notice however when I’d finished playing and went to shut it down, it doesn’t have hibernate, something I use a lot. I know it has an SSD and boot times are super fast but why wait 10 seconds when it could boot in 2. So I did a quick bit of research and it turns out the XPS and a lot of other new Windows 7 Ultraboooks are shipping now with something called Intel Rapid Start technology.

Basically it’s like a more intelligent version of the old sleep and hibernation modes. Putting the computer to sleep now puts it into low power mode, with the added option of a wakeup feature (Smart Connect Technology) which will refresh email, download updates when the computer is “asleep”. Personally I don’t think I’ll be using that feature but is it an interesting idea. The second part of the Rapid Start is after a preset time (configurable) the computer goes from sleep to hibernate effectively using zero power, and apparently through optimizations and the use of SSDs Intel has made it faster than the old hibernate.

Probably doesn’t sound like a big deal but it’s the little features like this that make a difference. I’ll let you know in a few weeks if I’m still liking it or the shine has worn off.

-Luke