I had been considering buying a new laptop for months and had narrowed down my requirements to this list:
Decent enough processor(A core2 duo 2.0 Gz was ideal)
Lots of RAM(RAM technologies tend to become obsolete and by the time you want to upgrade it, its either not available any more or hopelessly expensive)
A good graphics card(I want to play all the latest and the greatest games)
As high screen resolution as I can get.
Good battery life.(9 cell preffered, I don’t mind the extra weight)
I came across the Dell M1530 and it was exactly what I wanted. I configured my machine on the dell.co.in site and got the machine in a week’s time. Here’s the config I bought:
Price: Rs. 63000
This model comes with an Nvidia 8600GT card(256MB) which can play almost all current games. I also got a great deal wherein I upgraded to a 9cell battery for just Rs.1500 extra.(Included in the 63000)
*The good:
*Great looking machine that absolutely rocks! Its a powerhouse, and yet, very very stable. Came preinstalled with Vista home premium(with SP1) which I cleaned out and repartitioned / reinstalled the OS. I have not faced any blue screens/issues in sleep/hibernate. Everything just works out of the box. The multimedia buttons work flawlessly and come in handy when you want to increase/decrease volume in the middle of a game.
Comes with a small media remote control that fits into the right edge of the machine.
*The bad:
*Dell does not ship the 64bit Vista CD with the machine which is kind of sad, because the machine fully supports it and almost all 64 bit drivers are now available. I had installed the 64 bit version on another partition and it worked great for me.
The touchpad is not the best and tends to move the mouse cursor around randomly, but its a minor issue.
The hard disk makes a clicking noise. If I did not know better, I would take that as a sign of impending disk failure.
*The ugly:
*Media Direct sucks. period.
The media direct key is a’suicidal’ button and there is no way to disable it. If you have not installed Media Direct or the installation is corrupt and you happen to hit this key when the machine is off, it will make your machine unbootable. For some reason it wipes out the boot record on the hard disk. The only way to get your machine back to working state is to reinstall the OS.
Media direct makes no sense to me at all, since this machine boots from hibernate in less than 20 seconds, I might as well play movies in Vista.
Overall: Great machine! Total value for money. At first 63000 might sound a little steep, but considering the hardware this machine flaunts, it is completely justified,