Dell Vostro 1500 Review

At first look, its a solid black mass with the hint of silver. You open the lid and it’s the same, but power it up, and blue lights are used for most displays. It doesn’t look as bad as my first statement sounds, it’s not black, more a dark grey colour with that weird speckled glittery look. It feels sturdy, partly made of some alloy (I believe) which is partly responsible for the weight of the thing. It certainly is not really designed for portability (it’s doable, but not often). Keyboard is quite nice to use, doesn’t bend or flex.The bigger 85 watt/hour battery sticks out the back of the laptop, ok that makes it a little bit weird, but I’m not worried about that. Also the laptop does get very hot when doing some moderate work, when just doing nothing, surfing the net, chatting on IM its fine, quite cool. Doing more than that and the temperature will go up, although I might need to give the underside more ventilation.  [Update: Jan 2009 - Battery life can be up to 5 hours on power saving mode (with wireless off), which is damn impressive.  I’d guess about an average of 3 hours.  I’m even happier that this is after a year and three months and the battery is still great.]  Charging time is 2 hours, from fully discharged to fully charged. Performance on battery is obviously less than when running off AC mains. Depends what you want, if you want the performance, then you sacrifice the battery life. Boot times on battery are a little slower than when on mains power, obviously I don’t recommend doing any intensive tasks (gaming, video editing, etc) whilst being on battery as you probably won’t get the performance you want.

I’ll post my specs here: Core2Duo T7300 2.00Ghz, 4mb L2 shared cache, 800mhz fsb
2048mb (2gb) 677mhz RAM
160Gb 5400rpm sata hard drive
Nvidia 8600M GT 256mb
Standard Intel ABG wireless, webcam.
Standard Non-glossy screen [15.4" Wide Screen WXGA (1280 x 800)]
Vista Business (comes with 32bit version)

The wireless works fine, although I’m not that far from my router. I can’t comment on extreme performance yet as I haven’t run any benchmarks. The laptop handles everything I’ve thrown at it so far, mostly multi-tasking, and working dual-screen all the time since this makes typing up stuff much easier and films are better on my external monitor. In order to combat the heat I’ve raised it up using two pieces of wood, which allows more air underneath. I also don’t move the laptop round very much, no need to really as it’s more a compact desktop replacement for me. What games I do play on here run fine, mostly older stuff, but supreme commander ran fine at medium settings (maybe, or it might of been low, I can’t remember), But I removed it, because it crashed a couple of times, and I only had the demo anyway. Unreal Tournament 3 runs at maximum settings on the resolution of the laptop screen fine, some lag, but it doesn’t bother me oh and the Nvidia driver crashes but that’s not the laptop’s fault. Call of Duty 4 runs with pretty much low settings (mostly off) on everything, looked fine to me, still playable, so I wasn’t bothered.

I went for the standard screen, since I realised that the glossy ones tend to reduce usability by being too reflective, besides I’m not bothered about that extra bit of clarity. The viewing angle for the screen is rubbish, you’ll be sitting there and if you sit back a little bit you’ll have to adjust the screen to see it properly, but that’s a minor problem to me. The laptop also collects dust very quickly.

That outer casing on the lid is easily spoilt by finger marks, and they don’t come off easily. Unfortunately it is difficult to prevent as you need to touch the lid in order to open the laptop, so you can’t win.

I’m just going to comment briefly on how the laptop is with Windows Vista. The laptop can run vista fine, no problems at all, Vista is still Vista though, slow in places, annoying in others, and sometimes down right stupid, but I’m getting used to it. If you don’t like Vista, go for XP, this laptop should be nice and stable on XP with no issues (correct me if I’m wrong).

Here is a record of when I ordered and problems I encounter them. (HDD clunking is one of them).

Here’s some pictures (finally got round to taking some, this is my set up while I’m at uni). Click to enlarge (sorry for any poor quality as they have been compressed before uploading.) You can see how much the battery sticks out the back.

If you feel that higher resolution pictures would be helpful, leave a comment and check back in a few days, and I will try to sort some out.