I never had a laptop.
Never used it.
Never thought I’m going to need it.
“Desktop FTW!“ I always said.

Until all of the sudden the power of outlet display in the mall dragged my soul into the world of Hedonist; and before I know it, I already had this XPS M1330 knocking my apartment’s door one week ago.

The story began when I was walking in Circuit City like month ago, and I saw dozen of laptops nicely lined up on the display rack, from 17″ to the cute 12.1″ one.

That was the first time I know that such ultra-portable laptop even exist (call me out-dated), and I amazed with the WXGA screen quality.

I went home, and time gone by. One day I started to dig a little more information about today’s laptop. Brand, screen size, price, features and such things. I forgot how many years days I abused my web-browser to get those reviews from various websites.

Then, I got my first laptop from e-bay (yay!). Used laptop from Acer, Aspire 5050-3785. 14.1″ Turion Mobile 2.2GHz. Everything was okay, unless the fan produced too many noises, and it easily overheated. I put it back on ebay for less than one week… and it sold (Thank God!).
“Bye my first laptop!”

The next day, I bought Dell XPS M1330, from the official website of Dell.com. It has 13.3″ screen size, thin and light (around 4 pounds). The noise (the first thing I put my attention on), is unnoticeable. The design is pretty lux, and the features are pretty handy. I love this laptop.

At the first glance, M1330 has a nice design. The aluminum silver brushed for keypad up to the side border of the screen looks great. The cover also has the same tone of color. The screen is sharp and clean, however it’s easily distort (the colors and brightnesses) in a little change of angle. Mine has an integrated 2.0 MP Web Camera on top of it, and the quality is pretty clean and solid. Not saying it’s a scratch-resistance, but I think it has that kind of feeling.

There are 8 media buttons, and all of them are touch-buttons. Power button in the middle, and there are 2 speakers on top of it (left and right). Even it’s a stereo, it lacks of the bass sound, but it’s pretty loud. The keypad is pretty firm and quiet while typing. The only thing that bothers me is the touch-pad size. It’s too small I think; but the buttons are soft and comfy (“I can’t see those buttons in the picture..” — sorry, It’s cropped..).

It came with the Windows Vista (Blah! Edition). I formatted it and went back to XP for now. The installation procedure was quite tricky, started from the SATA-Drive problem, until look up for compatible drivers for this laptop (since the official website is not always trust able). It has 2 USB Ports, 1 HDMI port, 1 SD-Card reader, and 1 bigger card-reader (whatever it is, 5-1 Media Reader I think), and other miscellaneous ports.

It also has a slim DVD/R/W optical drive, which is so sexy, but it “roars” every time you put the CD in or pull it out. Yea, it’s loud, but just for 1 second.

The noise (as I mentioned before) is almost unnoticeable. Even when it spins out at maximum speed (when it reaches certain degree), you can tell it’s a quiet fan. The cooling system also works like a charm. I tried to rendering the high-res movie, and playing photoshop at the same time, the core temperature up and down around 45 to 62 Celsius. (my first Acer normally went 60-70 Celsius in between, and once, when I tried to ‘rape’ it with some heavy tasks, it reached 95 Celsius before I freaked my nerve out).

The standard battery is 6-cells lithium ion pack. It has 4 and 9 cells as optional choices. By single full charge, heavy to normal various tasks will consume the battery life for about 2.5 up to 4 hours. That’s a great one for 6-cells battery, combined with a kind of high-performance series of laptop.

I have 21 days return policy, and 1 year warranty since I bought this. I’m on my test-drive with this laptop. I leave it on, and it’s been 3 days for now. I’ll give it 2 week, see if it’s going to explode or not, hehehe.

I got Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5250 (1.5 GHz), 2 GB DDR2 (667 MHz), Windows Vista Home Premium Windows XP Professional, 13.3″ WXGA, Intel GMA X3100, Chipset 965, SigmaTel High-Def Audio, 120 GB HDD (5400 RPM), Slim-Drive DVD/R/W Combo.

Yeah, it’s pretty standard, since you can order Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T9500 (2.6GHz/800Mhz FSB/6MB cache) Santa Rosa Chipset, with a powerful NVidia GeForce 8400M GS video card, today; but I just don’t need that kind of power…. yet.

Overall, I’m pleased with this purchase.

(Now I have the feeling that I’m going to sell my desktop… — “No.. Don’t!”)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 12:36 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

« “Oha~ Lucky!!” [Lucky ☆ Star] || Vista Ready? Yeah Right.. »