[New] Vostro V13

Can anybody tell me a little more about the sound quality of the built in speaker?

I would like to be able to use this laptop for watching tv shows and youtube without plugging in external speakers or headphones. Is the v13 suited to this?

 

I would say the speaker is a bit worse then your standard laptop. From what I can figure out, the speaker is underneath the keyboard. I've watched videos on it a few times, but I prefer to use my headphones. While it is a matter of taste, the speakers are defiantly not the strongest point of the laptop.

 

I listened to the radio this morning on the laptop for about an hour. I've watched several hours of hulu and netflix without noticing any sounds issues. I think the speakers work great and are plenty loud. If you need something stronger wear headphones or hook up external speakers. If you are sitting in front of the laptop and typing on the keyboard I don't think you will have any trouble hearing audio while watching a video. I listened to the radio while working in the kitchen this morning and I had no trouble hearing the shows host while walking all over the kitchen.

 

Mine is the SU7300 C2D at 1.3ghz\800fsb. Asus OC this to 1.73ghz\1066fsb by way of Turbo Boost feature. So it should mean I can do the same.

However, the Setfsb discussed here only adjusts to 250fsb and not 266 fsb if i'm not mistaken?. Does anyone know how to get it to do 266fsb.
Thanks

 

Can you, too, confirm whether or not you can turn the overclocking off?

 

Another new V13 owner here!

I must say I am very pleased with my choice. The chassis is very rigid and looks great, reminds me of the ones on the much more expensive Fujitsu Lifebooks.

Fan noise is non-existent although the hard drive makes a kind of constant "white noise" type of sound that almost sounds like a typical fan noise. I plan on getting an SSD within the next 6 months though so no biggie...

Keyboard is really pretty decent. No noticeable flex, the keys sound a little cheap and thin when you type on them but nothing bad. SO happy Dell went with a real keyboard, I cant stand the recent trend to the crappy "chiclet" or "island" keyboards. Touchpad works great (I disabled the pinch and squeeze as I found it annoying when my browser would resize on accident). So glad they put REAL touchpad buttons on this one.

Sound quality is a little "tinny" but plenty loud I think ...not terrible considering the size of the laptop. This is a featherweight laptop people. Headphones sound great as do small external speakers.

I opted for the Core 2 U7300 with 2GB of ram and the shipped price ended up being $685.

Running photoshop CS4, visual studio 2008 and office 2007 with no issues. The thing is very snappy. (coming from a 2ghz C2D Dell 1420)

The one thing I noticed is you have run CPUZ to see the actual current clock speed of the CPU because even on battery power with power management maxed, doing a properties on MY COMPUTER still shows 1.3 @ 1300mhz.

I'm averaging about 4 hours and 15 minutes when websurfing with brightness a few notches from the lowest setting, bluetooth and ethernet disabled, aero bling crap turned off, and all non-needed services turned off. Running with half brightness I get about 3 hours and 45 minutes. Screen is very clear, text is easy to read and images look great.

Planning on getting another for my wife in a few months. Very happy with the purchase.

My previous laptops:

Dell 1420
Dell Inspiron 6000
Fujitsu Lifebook S7010
Misc older thinkpads

My experience:

I worked as a PC tech for several years in a very busy shop and probably worked on well over a thousand laptops. Dells were among the easiest to work on and were the least frequently serviced brands. When they were in, it was for a power jack repair or bad DVDROM or something minor. Brands I would stay away from are: HP, Compaq, Gateway, and Asus as they seemed to be in for bad motherboards fairly frequently and the faster models seem to always have loud fans/overheating issues.

The V13 is an amazing value for the money I think.

 

I heard dell is going to release another laptop, the latitude 13, which should be almost identical to the V13

 

Sound quality is very good considering the overall hardware.

 

Problem solved.

After several reboot, shut down, sleep, I found finally how to disperse this OC spell...
Reboot is useless, shut down works, and most importantly, you just need to make your system sleep and awake it, even immediately. You will find it is no longer going berserk.
Normally, reboot costs me 2mins, but sleep-awake lasts only 15-20 secs. Obviously, the latter is more cost effective...

 

According to writer's explication in another forum, PLL is under TME mode (Trusted Mode Enable) which functions like a hardware based prohibition to overclock attempt. If you use SetFSB to check PLL information, you will find 09 Byte is 65h, 01100101b, bit 6 = 1 which means read-only, and only hardware mod possible to overclock. However, he located a loophole and successfully set 133 to 166 and 200 to 250. Unfortunately, 266 is not available, unless you want to try hardware mod to overclock...

ASUS doesn't use the same clock generator, I presume. I also want a turbo 33 on my V13...

Anyway, 25% is better than nothing...

He also explicated how the tool functions. Once OC succeeds, the application terminates immediately itself to free system resource. So no process could be found in task manager.