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Modern laptop with excellent features 27 of 27 Ciao Users found the following review helpful
Rating from cathy_m80 5 Stars ()

Advantages Fast, looks good; nice screen

Disadvantages Dim screen in power-saving mode

I have to admit from the start that while I'm no technophobe, I'm no computerexpert either. My previous laptop was a very old Sony Vaio that was dying a slow death and failing to keep up with the modern world - I needed a computer to edit my photos on, preferably one that could connect to the internet on the same day I logged on!

My reasons for choosing the XPS M1530 weren't great - I initially planned to buy a much cheaper laptop but had heard that this was top-range, and figured it wouldn't date too quickly. I also needed a computer capable of handling Vista without going into meltdown. It's not the cheapest machine on the market - the Dell 1520/1525/1720 range are cheaper but don't look quite as good - though I'm sure they would have done a pretty good job too!

The main attractions of the M1530:

Fast processor - mine has the T5450 (1.66GHz) but better are available
2GB of RAM as standard
250GB storage - very handy but sure that won't seem like much in a couple of years!
Very nice screen - high resolution
Good graphics card (NVidia GeForce 8600M GT)
Good battery life - see below
Decent sized keyboard
Relatively low weight for its specs
Fingerprint reader - bit of a gimmick possibly, but makes logging on easy

I opted for one of the standard black matt covers - I'd read that these attracted fingerprints but for some reason didn't believe it - THEY DO. On the other hand, if you're not too fussy about appearances, after a few months the marks don't appear too obvious (I suspect because they merge together).

The laptop worked straight out of the box. Start-up is relatively quick. One big plus is the nice screen - the reason I hung onto my old Vaio for ages is they do have great screens with vivid colours, however I can't see a huge difference with this and in some respects it's better - certainly having the wide screen makes a massive difference to how cluttered the desktop feels.

There's a number of pre-installed desktop backgrounds - some of them very nice and a cut above what you usually get. I must say Vista doesn't always run super-quick (I've not installed SP1 yet as I've heard it's a bit buggy - but I think it does speed up certain functions). Downloading was certainly very fast, 1-2GB of data taking max 5 minutes.

The battery life is apparently 3 and a half hours - but I found the screen intolerably dim when on standard settings. It's basically on reduced brightness as soon as it goes to battery - then becomes progressively dimmer. My eyes aren't great (short-sighted) and after a while I got sick of it and changes it to "high performance". Depending on what I'm doing, it can last up to an hour and I'm usually happy with that.

It took me a couple of moments to find the DVD drive - I was looking for an old-style disc drive, whereas this just slides into a drive built into the machine. I was worried it might prove too flimsy at first - seems ok so far. There's also a 2MP webcam, but I haven't got round to using that yet so can't comment on it.

As for the fingerprint reader - can't make my mind up.

Detailed Rating

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cathy_m80

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Previous page Next page Page 1 of 6 | 1 - 5 out of 28 comments
  • gemsarchitect 11/09/2008 07:08
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful

    I have rated ur review of XPS, wants some rating from ur side abt my same XPS 1530 review. Thanks

  • gemsarchitect 06/09/2008 05:50
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful

    This is nice one....good job.

  • marymoose99 26/07/2008 16:52
    Rated this review as
    Helpful
  • Zmugzy 18/07/2008 14:37
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful
  • marcellep2 18/07/2008 14:30
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful
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