I haven't really talked much about the laptop I'm using on a daily basis and the laptop that we took around the world on our honeymoon.  However, it's been a really great laptop.  It's strikes a wonderful balance between performance, weight, functionality, size, and battery life.

It's in the XPS line of gaming laptops, which basically means it has the option (currently) of a NVDIDIA 7400 256MB TurboCache video card instead of the standard GMA950 of the Intel chipset. The card has 64MB of built in video RAM with the rest being shared with the system.  This gives it pretty good performance, but not great.  However, at 1280x800, it's not bad at all.  I still have to play stuff like NWN2 at lower resolutions, but that's even true on our QX6700/7950GX2 system.  With a dual core processor it's rather responsive and speedy at most things.

The weight is a bit over 4.5 pounds so it's very easy to carry around, which was especially useful when traveling around the world.  The included power supply is also relatively light, especially compared to the XPS Gen2 brick.  It's very light on the lap, has an intake on the bottom and exhausts on both sides.  It gets warm when active but right now it's hardly spitting out any heat at all.

Mine doesn't have the built-in webcam (erf) or the EVDO card, but those are both options allow it to be very functional.  It's also at the right size to still have a full DVD burner as well as basically a full size keyboard.  It has a MediaDirect button that does a few different things.  If the machine is on, it launches the Dell media experience application.  If the machine is suspended or hibernated, it wakes it up out of hibernation and launches the application.  However, if the machine is off, it starts directly into a special boot mode that is the Dell media experience but without the rest of the OS around it.

The battery life has been great, although rapidly getting worse.  When we first got it, I would often get 6 hours on dim setting with web browsing over WiFi.  Now I can barely get 4 hours with the same usage patterns.  Sure, the machine has been through a lot and the battery is used often since it does still last for quite a while.  However, I am still disappointed by this.  This one has the 1.66GHz Core Duo, while new ones start with the 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo.  I suspect it uses slightly less power than the new ones, but the faster ones would be nice, too. ;)

In the end, it's a great machine for blogging and browsing in front of the TV.  It also connects up to the VGA input of the TV for a full 1920x1080 experience with ease.  For gaming, it's adequate at the native resolution of the screen.  It could certainly be much worse.  I would have preferred to have the built-in webcam and Vista, but I got it long before the Vista promotions for free upgrade.  But, regardless, I'm quite happy with the machine. 

Posted by Shane on February 5, 2007 7:49 AM | Permalink