John Luif

The good, the bad, but damn good looking

I just received a new Dell XPS M1330 today and here are my first impressions.

The Good:  Dell’s expected ship date was 3 weeks from now so I was very pleased that I received it five days after ordering it.  The laptop is small but seems somewhat heavy mostly because of the 9 cell battery.  The weight is not an issue to me but something worth noting. I opted for the default screen which I’m very pleased with thus far.  The display is crisp and clear and is easier on my eyes than the anti-glare screen on a Dell D820.  The remote is very nice when using the laptop with media center.  The internal hard drive (7200rpm 160GB SATA) is reasonably fast by not as fast as a 7200rpm 3.5inch SATA drive but this is to be expected from a 2.5inch drive.  The finish of this laptop is very good, it feels solid and has a good feel to the keyboard.  I opted for the finger print reader which is really nice since I don’t like typing in a ton a passwords.

The Bad:  The battery was the first thing I noticed.  I did not realize that the 9 cell battery would be sticking out the back end.  The battery ends up limiting movement of the screen to a near vertical position which I want if I’m using a stand with another monitor.  I would recommend going with one of the smaller battery options.  The second big beef I have with all Dell laptops right now is even if they are 64 bit Dell is shipping them with the 32 bit OS.  I did not find this out until after emailing with Dell.  This really pisses me off after getting 4GB of memory which will not all show up on a 32 bit OS.  The last thing I have to complain about is the HDMI output.  When I first saw this feature I thought it was a great idea provided it was actually used for what it was intended for; output for uncompressed digital video and audio signal.  Well Dell got it half right, it outputs a video signal but no audio.  Why the hell even have HDMI output!  Remove the VGA and HDMI output from the laptop and just have a DVI output if there is not going to be audio output from the HDMI.  I don’t know if the lack of audio output is a limitation of the hardware or the software but I hope it is the software/driver and it can be fixed soon.

I will post a followup after using this laptop for a few weeks.