Dell XPS M1330 PC Notebook

The XPS M1330 is the second Dell laptop I’ve owned. The Inspiron 9400 put me off buying another Dell - for the wrong reasons really. I didn’t want another high end laptop with poor battery life, and at just over £1000, the XPS M1330 seemed like a good choice. At 13.3″ it’s portable and packed with features.

The first thing I noticed about the M1330 was how thin it is. It’s about 1.5cm thick at the back, and tapers down towards the front. The keyboard’s a standard laptop keyboard and there’s plenty of room to rest your palms while you type.

The display is clear and vibrant. I opted for the better screen which meant I only got a 0.3MP webcam, but a screen’s used a lot more than a webcam - so it was worth it. It’s much use at brightness levels lower than 6/8, but the resolution is good for it’s size. There’s an inbuilt GeForce Go 8400, which is more than enough for light gaming, but don’t expect to run FEAR at maximum detail.

Battery life is very good. With the screen brightness to 3/4 and WiFi on, doing web browsing and word processing the battery lasted for 5 hours 24 minutes, which could be extended by reducing the screen brightness.

The keyboard and touchpad are as expected, there’s plenty of room to rest your palms while you type. The media buttons are a very nice feature. Whereas on the Inspiron 9400 they were physical buttons infront of the touchpad, on the M1330 they’ve been moved to the top edge between the speakers and the power button. The physical buttons have been replaced by touch sensitive keys which glow when you press them.

Connectivity on the M1330 is impresive. There are two USB ports - enough for an external mouse and hard drive, aswell as Firewire, VGA and HDMI out. Dell also included a multi-format card reader. 10/100Mbps ethernet is included, but surprisingly Dell left out a modem (does anyone even use 56k anymore?). The M1330 comes with an Intel AGN Mini PCI card, Bluetooth 2.0 and an infra-red receiver for use the the remote control, which slots into the ExpressCard slot. The remote control sounded like a gimmick at first but it’s actually pretty useful. If you’re watching a video and lying down, you can can navigate around and control the volume.

I was stung by Dell’s MediaDirect feature on the 9400. It was dark, I pushed the MediaDirect button instead of the power button. Instead of giving the user any kind of confirmation or checking whether you’ve juggled your partitions from the factory default, MediaDirect just de-allocates the drive letters from all partitions except C:\, then creates a second partition at the end of your drive and installs a stripped down version of XP which Dell calls MediaDirect. I had to spend an hour recovering my partitions. My advice is to delete all partitions on the hard drive, then re-create them as you want. That way, there’s no danger of starting MediaDirect by accident. It doesn’t do anything Windows Media Centre can’t do anyway, it’s just a Dell branded version.

The webcam is better than I expected. For the occasional conference on Skype or MSN 0.3MP is an ample resolution. There’s an LED which glows blue when the webcam is in use, so there’s no danger of anyone watching you pick your nose without your knowledge.

This review is also available at http://leghumped.com/blog/dell-xps-m1330/

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