Dell XPS M1330 or alternative?

[haydox]

Well, ive owned it for a while now so ill tell you all i can think!

Processing power is fine for doing all of what you want, and making it even better for DVDs is that it comes with a little remote which fits in the express card slot! So you can control DVDs and videos via that remote.

CAD and the like may stress it a little as its not that powerful, but i use Photoshop CS3 perfectly fine!

As for battery life, it comes with two! A small 4 Cell and a larger 8 Cell which i can get easily over 3 hours off, especially with the screen brightness low (still totally fine to watch) and wifi off (not needed if you are watching a film). I dont really use the 4 Cell but that will give maybe up to 2 hours and is great for a backup and also lies totally flat when in the laptop unlike the 8 Cell which raises the back a bit (makes it easier to type though). To be honest ive not yet tried using the laptop as power savingly as i can on the large battery as the charger is always at hand.

I also havent noticed any audio distortion from the speakers which are very good quality. They actually arent even HP speakers, they use Altec Lansing ones which are apparently a better make...

Finally, the laptop has inbuilt bluetooth which works excellently with my phone so i see no reason why a bluetooth headset wouldnt work.

I would highly recommend the laptop and was very nicely surprised with the extra battery it came with (i thought it only came with the 4 Cell), the remote which goes in the side and the bluetooth capability!

Any more questions just ask here or on msn (haydock2004@hotmail.com).

 

[pfield69]

Thanks. There is nothing like hearing a real users experience.
I am surprised it comes with the 2 batteries (HP marketing are missing a sales point).
At the moment I use a q6600 based desktop which i do most of my work on but in the past 4 years I have spent most of my time in hospital. During this time I have used my wifes HP nc6320. It is quite good but produces lots of heat and the fan is also noisey with no DVD W facility or webcam. It does have a 15.4 4:3 screen tho.
The Tx is the very top end of my budget and not sure if the pen interface is worth it. I tried at Tesco's and was impressed that even leaning through the display case and writing at an angle it recognised all my words.
A couple of questions that I would like answered are
1. Is the small screen ok to work with long term
2. How noisey is it
3. How much heat does it through out and where (I tried on laptop with a front mounted fan thus blowing hot air directly at the user - nice)
4. The bluetooth headset I'd like to use is a stereo streaming headset (A2DP). It connects to 2 devices at once letting me use the pc and answer phone calls. It would be good to see if this protocol is supported.
5. Is the pen interface worth the extra or is it just a gimmick
6. what input device to you use, I was going for a small bluetooth mouse. I find the touch pads are too sensative to play poker causing me to make calls I didn't intend.
7 lastly, is the battery hot swappable and are there larger capacity batteries available.

Thanks very much for you help. Below is a list of software i use.
Photoshop
Avid HD Pro
Pro Engineer
AutoCad
Office 2003
& looking for a good sketch package - maybe coral draw

 

[haydox]

Well, firstly, i use photoshop and office 2007 from your list and can verify they work excellently, especially photoshop with the touch screen.

Now for the questions:
1. Ive had no problems with the screen when using it off my lap, even on 50% brightness its fine. The only thing to note is its slightly grainy but thats the touch film on it.

2. The fan is usually very quiet, only hitting full speed for short bursts and even then its not bad, just a wirring noise. At the minute the noise of just my typing is pretty much drowning out the fan.

3. The fan is in the back corner so with the 8 cell battery it is raised off the ground allowing better cooling. After an hour of so of use the bottom gets quite warm if on your lap but its nothing compared to a high powered mac book which actually cooks your legs!

4. Ill check about the bluetooth on it in a bit, ive got to go out for 30 mins or so in 15.

5. I thought the pen would be cool just when i wasnt using the keyboard and touch pad but i use it most of the time! Its so much easier than the touch pad and the handwriting recognition software is amazing, it reads my writing even when my brother cant!

6. As i said, i use the pen instead of the pad. When its hovering over the screen a dot appears showing you where it is and this deactivates the rest of the screen so resting your hand on it has no effect when hand writing.

7. Not sure about this, i imagine is might be as long as you plug it in temporarily whilst you do it.

Update: 4. Ive looked at the bluetooth and i cant find many details on it, the data sheet for the laptop (http://h20195.www2.hp.com/PDF/c01405283.pdf) just says Bluetooth. If you know of a way for me to test if its capable for what you want say and ill give it a go.

 

[pfield69]

I bought a TX2130 from Tesco.
I was surprised how much trial software came with it.
Given its amazing spec I was disappointed on how slow it appeared to function. After a few mails to HP I reloaded the system from the recovery disc, removed unwanted s/w, re partioned disc so swap file was on its own partition. This increased the speed a bit but still quite slow.
I checked the system with Sandra and found that the system was running really slow (cpu@780Mhz, mem@2.7gb/s, wifi @1.8Mp/s). This was on battery power. The results on mains power were more like it (cpu @2ghz, mem 4.75gb/s wifi 2.71Mb/s) but the fan was flat out constantly the psu got very hot & the air duct burnt my leg. These setting can be changed through the power settings.

The small battery was unable to play a DVD film all the way through, the larger battery took ages to charge whilst in use. I couldn't see the screen outside due to the reflection. The speaker were very quite.

The tablet function was exceptional though.

I've borrowed a friends compaq 1.67ghz. It runs cooler, quiter, faster/longer on battery and only cost £329 (TX2130 was £699). Returned the TX to Tesco.

i'm still looking for a lifestyle notebook thats light weight.

 

[haydox]

Ive noticed that it can get hot when running whilst on your lap but if you use it on a flat surface its fine (or have it on your lap so you arent blocking the fan vent - the big battery helps as it raises the fan vent off the surface)! Also, ive uninstalled all the software that came with it, using my own instead such as NOD32 virus scanner which is the least demanding out there. Oh, and doing a partial clean boot helps loads too as i can stop all processes running except the virus scanner and the tablet ones on start up which makes a huge difference to the speed.

Ive noticed no problems when running off battery though! The system hasnt been running as drasticaly slow as you claim, it may be a little slower but not by much. I think ill try that trick with the swap file though, did that on my desktop.

Oh, and as for the screen being to reflective to see outside, if you put the screen brightness up a little bit its perfectly manageable and also, the glossy screen is about the most commented upon tihng in any review you could possibly find about it!

On the plus though, if you still want a lightweight notebook maybe you should try the XPS1330 which i was originally looking at, i saw one in pcworld where i got this tablet and they look really nice, are small and very well priced (and brilliant according to all reviews!). One thing to note is, when buying it (use the dell online store) dont get the 9 cell battery off them, they charge about £150 for it with the 1330, where as if you get the 4 cell which it comes with as standard you can get an original dell 9 cell for about £70 elsewhere on the net (saving you a fair bit of money and giving you a spare battery too)! Or, if you dont mind spending more (im talking up to £1k now) get a Toshiba Portege, they are small, lightweight and if you get a big battery for them the battery life is awesome (my uncle's can last up to 10 hours doing word processing and using the net etc.).