Despite spending 1 month playing silly buggers with Dell’s incompetent sales staff (another wonderful call centre in India) trying to actually order the thing due to constant problems on their website and their always apologetic “please give me another chance” excuses, I went against my better judgement and still went ahead and purchased the Dell XPS.
I had spent so long comparing laptops and their features, and the XPS really does give you the most bang for your buck. More memory and more useful ports than the competitors and a full 1080 HD display is what really swayed me, plus the fact that I could have custom artwork on the lid.

My primary use for this laptop is as a development machine, running IIS, MSSQL, MySQL, ColdFusion etc as well as a general office machine, I had no 3D gaming requirements.

Thankfully I can say that so far I have not been disappointed despite my reservations. The XPS runs windows 7 64bit super fast with its 6GB RAM and Core i5 CPU, it boots fast, searches are fast, programs launch fast and has no problems running all my server apps and development tools (Adobe Creative Suite) all at the same time, even Photoshop, so I really have no complaints on the speed and to boot it is also very quiet and so far does not get very hot either.

The Windows experience index is only 4.4 but this is down the the graphics, which as I said I don’t care about, however it runs Windows Aero just fine. Here are the other indexes, which are much better.

Processor 6.9
Memory 6.9
Graphics 4.4
Gaming Graphics 6.5
Hard Disk 5.9

All in all it is actually quite a bit better than my desktop PC which has a highest index of 5.9, even the gaming graphics surprisingly.

The screen is super bright, so bright that I rarely have it set above 1/3 brightness,  however the primary colours (CMYK) are also on the bright side, not sure whether this is due to the gamma or the contrast, I have tried to adjust them but cannot get it to look quite right. For every day use this is not a big problem, however I do sometimes do some Photoshop work, which is where is does matter as images don’t look quite how they should.

The sound on the XPS is also remarkably good, utilising a JBL sound system, my rock/metal music actually sounds how I expect it sound, rather than the horrid tinny sound you get from most laptops.

Battery life is nothing amazing, but for a laptop of this power it does report a surprising 2-3 hours (depending on power saving features you enable etc), and it does have a built in automatic “Dell power saver” mode that turns off all the aero and other high performance windows features while on battery. Although this mode seems to disable itself once you plug back into the power, meaning you have to manually enable it again.

If you are one of those people that finds your hand constantly brushing against the touchpad and moving the cursor when typing, which messes up whatever your typing, then you will appreciate the “disable touchpad” key on the keyboard which you can quickly toggle when typing.

I did have to contact Dell support once, to find out how to adjust the LCD contrast etc and also because I thought they had printed my custom lid design upside down. Thankfully the support was considerably better than their pre-sales fiasco and non existent customer services. They quickly told me where to find the LCD settings (an icon in the system tray DOH!) and told me to send them a picture of the lid and if it was indeed upside down then they would send an engineer out to replace it. After checking the photos on the Dell site It turned out that the image was supposed to be upside down.

Views: 2289