It's here!

Over the last 2 or 3 days I've been monitoring the tracking number for my Dell XPS 700 system that I ordered last week (December 26th, to be exact). I must say, it got here rather quickly, seeing as it was shipped out from the United States, had to go through Canadian customs, and then moved all over Concord, ON for a day.

So much to my delight, when I woke up this morning I checked the tracking number status page - "Location: Dartmouth"; that means it was 2 hours away from where I lived. I called Midland Transport and asked them if they had an estimated time that it would be delivered in the next few days. The kind gentleman on the phone told me that it was already in my town and would be at my house within an hour and a half. Let the excitement begin.

I paced around waiting for them to show up, and I think it was the 10th time I had looked out the window when I seen the great big Midland 18-wheeler sitting outside of my house. I tore up the stairs so fast that I tripped and fell face first onto the floor but that didn't stop me, I was in a great mood.

They brought the package in the house for me and it was huge, and rather heavy to boot. I lugged it down to my bedroom and thats when the real fun began. I took the seal off the box and opened it up to be greeted with a black box with the Dell XPS logo on it. This box had two compartments, one for the keyboard and palm rest (my system shipped with a Dell Enhanced Multimedia USB Keyboard, which works natively in Windows), and the second compartment contained all the software discs, power cords, a Dell XPS CD/DVD case, a Dell XPS mousepad, and a mouse.

After getting this box out of the way you finally get to the system itself, and only one thing came to my mind at the time - "They weren't kidding with the Heavy Ordinance tag-line." I slowly and carefully lifted the machine out of the box, put the feet on it (this helps prevent it from tipping over, and the way the feet fold out remind me of a vehicle in Unreal Tournament 2004 that has those chopping blades that whip out from the sides).

Getting it up and running was a cinch, plugged everything in and turned it on, accepted the EULA, went through the Windows XP Out of the Box experience screens, and then logged in.

I formatted the machine 3 hours later anyway, as I don't use Google Desktop, and Norton Internet Security is a real pain in the rear to completely remove. (Dell, if you ever get around to reading this post by chance, do me a favor - offer a "none" option for Internet Security software, or at least an option to just have the bare operating system and drivers installed and thats it. I mean, really, seeing as the XPS series is your "gaming" class machines, I'd at least like to have this option so that I don't have to go through and format the system - and I'm sure there are many out there that agree with me on this).

The audio quality on this machine is awesome, powered by the all-mighty Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic card. What's really nice is that Dell has taken the time to hook up the front microphone and headphone jack to the sound card so that everything is fully functional. My music collection is being pumped out to my Logitech Z-2300 speaker system with absolute clarity, deep lows, crisp highs, and great mid-range.

After getting everything re-installed, I ran Unreal Tournament 2004 with 8xS Anti-Aliasing and 4x Anisotropic filtering and got an insane FPS rating of ~400. Application launch times simply don't exist, everything is snappy. The system is stable as a rock after running Prime95 and Super PI. Impressed? Hell yes.

I took some photos of the unboxing and I'll take some more later on. Right now, I'm off to enjoy some Unreal Tournament. Whee!