Bowman here from BWone.com giving you my final review of the Dell XPS M1530. It’s bigger, better and badder than it’s little older brother. Let’s take it for a test drive.
First thing I’m going to over some of the accessories that come with the XPS M1530, the first accessory I’m going to go over is a North Castellation ear buds that it come to it with. It’s a pretty decent pair of ear buds, you plug it here in the front so let’s say you’re in a noisy environment such as you know on an airplane or in a coffee shop and you want to listen some music or watch your DVD doesn’t make sure you hear things a lot better, it’s pretty decent pair.
Next thing that it comes with is this nice express board and dust clothe, you can keep your keyboard, you can keep your screen clean, it’s embroidered XPS and it’s all black. So it’s pretty nice. Next thing we going to go over here is your standard AC adaptor that comes with the unit. According to the back of the unit, it is at maximum output is 90 watts and it has output 19.5 volts. It has nice strap here so you can keep the wires nice and neat, it does gets a little warm for most AC adaptors do so don’t be alarmed. So when it’s charging it’s going to get a little warm and also it does have a little light indicator right here to let you know when it’s on.
Next thing is this leather bound XPS CD and DVD holder. So you can hold your movies in here if you want to, you can hold your recovery CDs, kind of like a small book here on the side, I hold them extra XPS remote little pouch here, closes up. It has nice magnetic clip right here and it has XPS embroider on the front. And the file thing I’m going to go over is the nice soft bound case that it comes with it. The nice case comes in all black with silver trimmings on the side, help protect it pretty decently, right here on the front it has three little magnets that connect to the bottom here and to keep it closed. And it’s pretty good so we’ll give this the biscuit test little later so stay tuned for that.
Next thing I’m going to go over is the overall performance in specs of the XPS M1530. Next I’m going to discuss some of the hardware specifications I’ve got on my XPS M1530. First the processor, I’ve got an Intel Core 2 Duo TX2500 Processor which rocks speed at 2.2 GHz with 4 MB of L2 cache, does share between two processors because it’s a duo core processor in 800 megatron side bus. Overall a very, very solid processor, it’s very cool to desktop speeds and I don’t feel I have to wait for anything, it’s very snappy and overall in a great performance and I would definitely recommend it to you.
Next stop is the memory, if you saw in to my previous hard drive memory installation video, and if you haven’t seen it, definitely go check it out. I installed two 1GB disc to make 2 GB of memory on my laptop, I’ve seen upgrade again and I want it to max out and so I maxed it out to it’s capacity which is 4 GB so I got two 2 GB sets of PC2-5300 DDR2 667 memory from Corsair. Corsair is a very reputable name, very, very good name and in the tech industry when it comes to memory. Very solid—very good to back up the Corsair memory, had a little bit cheaper deal than I got with the—memory at that time, so definitely good. Overall has very great performance that comes in a lot of application and it feels very, very, very good.
The recent upgrades that I was able to get PC 64 bit to install so for you guys out there looking to install this 64 bit it definitely can be done. You have to do a research you get few of the drivers here and there but most of the drivers will come from Windows update. One thing I wasn’t able to get to work with this finger print reader right here, which I don’t really use and I didn’t order it, it just ended up as a bonus on my order when I got my XPS.
The next thing I got is a graphics card. Graphics card is in NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT which rock at 256 MB of memory. It’s a very, very good—item, it was able to play a lot of games. I don’t want to advertise this as gaming notebook, the 1710 from Dell is more the gaming notebook. This notebook is definitely more your professional series notebook, it has a very good look to it. If people do looking for style and power at he same time, this is the notebook that you want I, this notebook that you going to want. And it also does play a lot of games pretty so.
For my hard drive you saw it I upgraded up to 7200 RPM hard drive, I got Seagate Momentus hard drive, can’t remember the exact model number at the moment. You can check on Tom’s hardware, the y have a little graph on there and it will show all the hard drives that are and where they rate for laptops. I got the top of the line one there, 160 GB Seagate Momentus hard drive. It does one a little warm right and you can hear it a little bit as you’re using but you definitely get speed out of it and the speed advantage you do feel that it’s running a lot faster very close to desktop speed.
With the screen, I got the basic tool of an 800 screen with it’s needed resolution for 15.4-inch monitor, the high def monitor by the weigh to, I’m overly satisfied with it. It looks really good, I don’t have any complaints about that at all. If they do up of a high resolution, if you’re looking for that but overall the screen is very good on this and it does came in high definition so you can watch any High def content that you want.
Next stop is the CD-DVD drive, I got the basic one that comes with a CD and a DVD burner, and I didn’t get the Blue ray option. Blue ray option is about I think $500 for it which is a pretty hefty option. And then one thing you’ll notice on the M 1330, the 13 is version of this no but the C drive was pretty loud. Seems to that it’s got a lot softer so I want to see if you can hear this here. So it’s definitely not as loud as it was before, definitely a lot quieter than it was before and you know you do hear as if you’re reading some media or some content off replaying DVD, you’ll hear it a little bit as a spinning around.
So overall it’s very good, and the reason I’m zooming in here is I want to show you kind of the front here and see the touch sensitive controls here at the very top. It’ll light up as you touch it and so if you have – X out of that, if you have right here you can click right here. Get—and the flame lights up blue and the eject button lights up blue. That’s pretty nice at the slot loading drive by the way so just so that you know. And I hope you could see the lights there everything at the top here is touch sensitive and it all worked really well, you get your basic media key, your defined key, your mute button and your eject button here.
Next thing over here is a dedicated Dell media direct button this sort of their like media center as application that is in back out here. It works pretty nicely, you can actually when you have the computer off you can turn it on and boot directly to that so you can get documents real quickly, you can get let’s say pictures, it has instant office right here if you can see. So you can get documents and it’s presentation and information and get it really quick. You can actually access it without you booting up the computer fully.
Next things up is the wireless that I have in it. It comes with a basic G option but actually upgraded to the wireless end, now I have wireless enrouter here and the performance is really good on in. I do get the end speed and also got a Bluetooth option on as well, not a big fan of Bluetooth but for Bluetooth type tether in to a phone definitely will come in handy for things of that nature. And overall I would definitely say this is been a very good notebook for me. I’m thoroughly impressed with Dell and in the time we took in the design in this notebook.
So many things that I do like about over the 1330, I do like the fact that it’s a nice 15-inch notebook. This isn’t that heavy and the weight is distributed very, very well, one of the things I did noticed is when I looked to the 1330 looked a little squished with the design as when I saw the 1530 it looks like it’s much, much spread and the design is kind of made for that.
So overall I will give this a thumbs up, this is definitely something I recommend, definitely something I would definitely save my money for the get. Overall it’s not really that expensive, I’ve spent about $1400.00 in a basic configuration $1600.00 total my debt on hard drive and the memory customization so definitely go out there and get this guys. This is Bowman from BWone.com signing off with this review of the Dell XPS M 1530.
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