Dell Precision M90

...could be?

Dell products have a great reputation and for good reason.
They seem to 'go wrong' far less than most of their competitors, have great customer services support in the rare cases that they do and the appearance and design of the products are always visually appealing.

There's another reason, and that would be the mix and match 'Ikea' effect. You can effectively select the product that you want on their ...
...parts in accordance with what you want.

This is an ideal feature, as you can guarantee that there' something about the standard package offered that you wish was different - more memory perhaps, or maybe a better resolution to the screen itself.
In some cases this will add cost and in others it will take it away.
For example...

If you would prefer to have an extra 1GB of memory with your laptop (this adds ... more

So the question would be - is the Precision M90 as Precisely great as it could be?

Dell products have a great reputation and for good reason.
They seem to 'go wrong' far less than most of their competitors, have great customer services support in the rare cases that they do and the appearance and design of the products are always visually appealing.

There's another reason, and that would be the mix and match 'Ikea' effect. You can effectively select the product that you want on their website, and then tweak it by upgrading and downgrading certain parts in accordance with what you want.

This is an ideal feature, as you can guarantee that there' something about the standard package offered that you wish was different - more memory perhaps, or maybe a better resolution to the screen itself.
In some cases this will add cost and in others it will take it away.
For example...

If you would prefer to have an extra 1GB of memory with your laptop (this adds lots of speed and gives a better performance overall), then you can expect to pay around an extra £53 for this particular item.
On the other hand, if you did not want the 3 years accidental damage cover which comes as part of this product, you can subtract over £100 from the final price.
Both of these features are recommended however.

The Precision M90 itself is a great looking laptop, very dark in colour as you can see from the photo. There is a 17" high quality display which is anti-glare. You can either choose the great resolution of 1440x900 pixels or go one better with the 1920x1200 for around an extra £74.00. Depending on what budget you're working towards obviously, the higher the resolution - the more impressive the display will be and the clearer the images will appear.

The processor is Intel Core 2 Duo which is designed to handle multiple applications at once with little or no system slowdown. This is ideal if you were wanting to say download something from the web and run a word processor at the same time. The speed of the processor is 1.66ghz which is good but not great, meaning that paying extra for a better speed would be a good choice. You can go as high as 2.33ghz but bear in mind that this would set you back as much as an extra £400+.

I would also recommend that you ensure that you have at least 2GB of memory installed if you are buying this laptop, as the intensive features that it offers on day of purchase such as the Windows XP professional, up to 160gb harddrive, up to 512mb graphics card etc will require a decent amount of memory space to avoid too much slowdown.

The system is a great-looking, easy to use and not-too-heavy one, although the size of the screen does make this less portable than say a 13.3" or 15.4" equivalent.
The graphics and speed capabilities are fantastic, but as mentioned above - do bear in mind that you will likely have to pay a fair bit more than the standard price to get the most out of the system, and this can push the price up considerably (upto £1500-£2000 quite easily).
The size of the monitor is excellent in that it is still portable, and gives a good-sized display to view DVD's on (a DVD player is supplied internally within the machine).

I would point out on a final note that modern laptops don't come supplied with floppy disk drives anymore, as these have been phased out.
You'll need to either think about investing in one extra for a small amount of money (average price is around 25 pounds) if you've still got files saved on these disks or think about transferring the files to another format such as a CD or even a handy flash memory drive which you can simply then plug in to a USB slot on the new laptop to retrieve information from. These can be bought for as little as £7.49 in some places.

That's it. A great laptop from a great provider. A good price, good after-service and the option to increase performance (at a price).
Now go do the maths, work out what you require and use Dell's great site to research what each feature does and make the decisions. 

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