New Dell Laptop XPS M1730

Last week, I bought a Dell Laptop for my road clients. It's an XPS Model 1730 with a whopping 17" screen. I always buy my Dell stuff in the outlet store and this laptop was refurbished. It boasts a dual core 2.8 Ghz Intel CPU, 4 GB Memory and came with Vista Ultimate. I paid around $2k for the system. So far I like it very much, the bootup is very fast and all of my development software installed very nicely. It has one of those fancy new 128 MB solid state drives that the operating system resides on and I guess that's why bootup is so fast. I also have a 360GB standard Seagate drive that I purchased at tiger direct for around $80. I like the screen size very much. This is NOT a good laptop for portability since it weighs a lot and requires a mammoth sized power supply that is about 8 x 4 x 2 inches. It's great for me because I frequently need the power of a desktop without lugging a desktop around in my car. If you are working on a plane or while riding the bus, this probably would not be a good choice. The power drain on the batteries is about 1 hour, perhaps one could get it to two hours by adjusting the power settings. If you require a more portable model, the XPS 15" models are just about the same as this 17" model in power and features, but much more portable and the batteries last longer. My son, Erik, uses a Dell XPS 15 while in college and likes it very much.