Thin and stylish from Dell! (Dell XPS M1330)

Member Name: davomrmac

Product:	Dell XPS M1330
Date:	20/10/08 (191 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Thin, fairly light, slot loading drive, nice screen

Disadvantages: LED backlit displays means lower quality webcam

The Dell XPS M1330 is the company's attempt at an ultra-portable laptop. Being a Mac fan, this was the obvious choice for me when choosing a PC latop, so I spent just over £900 with some options add to get one of these with an Intel Core2Duo T9300 2.5GHz processor. The processor is really rather fast and offers me a good enough turn of speed to use Photoshop and some high end applications.

I opted to stick with Windows Vista Home Premium as this was a no cost option and offers all that I need. I am not even sure what benefits the Business edition would give, so saved some money here.

You get 3GB of Dual Channel 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM as standard, so no extra to spend here really, unless you want to. I chose to spend an extra £30 to take this up to 4GB. The XPS is Dell's top line of notebooks, so I was very happy that this was maxed out. It allows me to have three or four applications running, without noticing any slowdown. Again, well chuffed here. All manufacturers should give a decent amount of memory in their systems.

On the graphics front, I had enough of laptops offering integrated or shared memory. My advice to you is to avoid them. They take memory allocation away from main system memory and are never any good for high end pro applications or games. The M1330 comes with a 128MB NVidia GeForce 8400M GS card. This is plenty for playing the latest games, though you may have to turn a few options down.

The screen is brilliant, called a 13.3" UltraSharp CCFL WXGA display (1280x800, 220 nits) with TrueLifeTM and 2.0MP webcam (taken from Dell's website). This display is small, but nice and sharp. Very bright too. You can opt for an LED backlit screen, which I wanted to do, but this means you can only have a 0.3MP webcam, so a drop in quality. Not sure why this is, so I stuck with the standard screen. Shame, as the LED on should have eeked out a little more battery juice.

I went for the standard 320GB hard drive. This is plenty for a portable laptop. It also came with a DVD+/-RW Drive so I can record to CD and DVD on the move. This is a slot loading drive, much nicer than having a flimsy tray popping out. Made me feel right at home too, due to being Mac-like.

You can choose from different coloured lids too Tuxedo Black, Midnight Blue or Bubblegum Pink. I went for the blue and it is really nice. Feels like a satin finish, but slightly rubberised. Nice and touch, I tried to scratch it, but it remained perfect.

The following is taken from the Dell website;
Weight & Dimensions
Weight: Starting at 1.79 kg2
Width: 31.8cm
Height: 2.21cm - 3.38cm
Depth: 23.8cm

I/O Ports
2 USB 2.0 compliant 4-pin connectors
IEEE 1394a
RJ45 Ethernet port (10/100)
External Modem via USB
Video: VGA
Video: HDMI
ExpressCard 54 mm slot
8-in-1 removable memory card reader
Audio jacks: Stereo in & headphone/speaker out (x2) dual digital array mics

As you can see, this is really fully featured. The screen is nice, the webcam and fingerprint reader are really nice additions too. Though this costs a little more than their other offerings, you can see that the money is well spent. It is worth paying that little extra.

Summary: It is worth paying that little extra

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