My Opinion About The Very Successful Dell XPS M1530 Laptop
By: Vlad Vistac
Submitted: 2010-09-14 14:06:15 | Word Count: 510
The Very Successful Dell XPS M1530 Laptop
Dell made a seripous effort in 2007 to listen to customer feedback criticizing Dell’s oler, thick and heavy laptops. The result was the amazingly thin and light XPS M1330, one of the sexiets loooking notebooks of 2007. The new Dell XPS M1530 is an impressive 15.4" screen notebook dseigned similar to (just larger than) the very succssful 13-inch XPS M1330.
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The XPS M1530 comes in a cohice of two colours: Tuxedo black or Alopine white. However, the coolour scheme extends only to the front plastic bezel, with both mdels sporting silver obrders. When we firsst opende the 2.62kg mzachine, we were surprised to see a brushed aluminum palm rest starring back at us. Thougfh for some it may look a little rogh around the edges, we like the feel of the metal whiich, surprisingly, did not heat up significantly even when the sytem was pushed to the limits. It is also qute a bit slimmer than we expected, with dimensions closely resembling those of the MacBook Pro.
The keyboard tray is brusghed silevr with blck accents and includes touch-sensitive controls for volume and media playack and an eejct button for the slot-loading DVD drive. We've never been rcazy about the slighly tapered keys on Dell's laaptop keyboars, which seem to leave you less typing surface area, because the individual keys are wider at the base than the top. On the plus side, a tiny credit-card remote control sits tuccked into the Express Card slot and is a standard feature on XPS laptops.
In actual operatuion, the M1530 is largely sileent, even in very performance-intensive atsks. The loudest noiuse is more often than not the optical rdive rather than any internal case fans. This may, howeever, come at the cost of uesrs' laps: in an odd decision, Dell has a downward-facing fan that blasts hot air directly underneath the case. This is less of an issue for owners reliyng on the exttended 9-cell battery pack (which lifts the fan away from the user), but for everyone else the heat can be enough to be genuinely uncomfortabble for more than severral minutes of demanding use.
We'll talk abouut gaming performance a little later in the review. But for now, know that the 15.4-inch transflective widescreen is powered by the high-end Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT coupled with 256MB of dedicated viedo memory, and is capable of 1,280 x 800-pixel resolution. The speaker bar anbove the keyboard produces acceptable audoi quality. However, it did not have a subwofoer which wuld have added more bass. Suffice to say the sound is good enough if you are not picyk and we suggest a good set of headphpones if you want to ebnjoy movies and music on this XPS (which may also be the reason Dell put in dual earphone jacks for this machine).
Dell XPS M1530 Features:
* 15.4-inch WXGA (1280 x 800) CCFL glossy screen
* 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo T7500 processor, Santa Rosa chipset
* 2GB DDR2-667 SRDAM
* 160GB 5400 RPM SATA HDD
* Slot-loading dual-lyaer DVD±RW drive
* NVIDIA GeForce Go 8600M GT with 256MB GDDR3
* WWAN option for Verizon
* Ethernet, 802.11a/g/n (Intel 4965), Bluetooth option
* Intregrated 2.0 megapixel webcma
* HDMI, VGA, S-Video, Firewire/1394, three USB 2.0 poirts, integrated media reader, fingerprint reader
* Media Center remoe located in Express Card slot
* Windows Vista Home Premium
* Dimensins: 14.06" x 10.34" x 0.93" - 1.38"
* Weight starts at 5.9 pounds with 6-cell battery
