8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Sleek mean light machine
Date of Review: Apr 25, 2008
The Bottom Line: Excellent machine, Dell has a real winner here. It is expensive but in the end its worth it.
My old Inspiron 4100 decided to break so I had to replace it and got totally sucked in to the latest technology from DELL. Although it cost me nearly $2,000 for a state-of-the art Penryn machine (2.5GHZ/3GB Ram/320GB HDD/128MB NVidia Video/LED Screen). Not only is it red, but this is by far the nicest laptop I have ever had.
Performance is what you would expect on a top of the line machine, but the real winner here is that its very close to ultralight in weight. Just over 4 pounds if you get the LED screen and the six cell battery, so not really much more than a large book, and easy to lug around. it also comes with its own case and a remote control which is nice for presentations.
LED screen is really beautiful but costs $150 more than the standard LCD option - that's a matter of personal choice really as the CCFL/LCD screens are gorgeous too. I think it makes a difference in battery life which is why I sprung for it, more than the 0.3 pounds or so weight that you save.
I bought the laptop with an extra battery, an expensive proposition now given the shortage in supply, but its a very nice addition. The 9 cell battery gives me enough juice to be productive on an intercontinental trip, or for a full day tooling around town without a need to bring along the separate power cord. With internet access you're looking at 4.5 to 5 hours, and turning off Wifi (using just productivity software for example) you can even get six hours or more. Of course, battery life is heavily dependent on the application you use and playing Civ 4 intensively drains the 9 cell battery in a couple of hours on the other extreme. Its nice to have the 6 cell as well as it makes for a sleeker form factor (but gives 2/3 of the battery life as you would expect).
I won't add too much about VISTA which has been mentioned enough on this site. You either love it or hate it but most people hate it. It comes as standard on the XPS but I tried installing Ubuntu Linux on a second which worked pretty well, before taking it off and dedicating the machine as a windows (Vista) laptop. Importantly, the minute I received the machine I reinstalled the OS from scratch in order to remove the bloatware kindly included by DELL, which improved the startup and shutdown performance of the OS by about 50%.
If interested in buying such a machine, I would wait for a sale or go through the EPP web site if you're eligible (I didn't tell you this here but I don't think they ask too many questions), where you get a 12% discount off the bat if you order a $1600 plus system with a three year warranty. If you spec out a less expensive system (you can get an XPS for as little as $1000) the discount will be smaller.
