Vostro 3300 - First Impressions

My brandnew DELL Vostro 3300 has arrived, some days earlier than expected.

First impressions:
- Notebook is quite small, although somewhat bigger than I thought. (But that may come from the fact that I did much webbrowsing on a Motorola Milestone yesterday )
- Build quality seems okay. For the price in fact good.
- Notebook is very lightweight. I have to measure the exact weight, but it feels much lighter than a DELL Studio 15.
- Power supply unit is very small and lightweight. Seems to be the same as the Studio 15's.
- Display is bright, colours are bright, seems to be an exact (smaller) copy of the Vostro 3700 with the same very limited viewing angle (not much of a problem to me when you do mostly office work and software engineering with dark letters on bright background, but could be a problem if you want to play games with mostly dark background).
- Keyboard is backlit, surprisingly good.
- Display and keyboard have relatively much flex.
- Battery is 4 cell, seems to last approximately 2:30 (with maximum brightness, WLAN on and light office work)
- It's very fast.
- It doesn't emit much heat, feels quite cool.
- It's relatively silent, so far.

Overall, a very pleasant surprise and, given the "cheap" price (entry busines class), good value.

 

Adding the specs:

DELL Vostro 3300
Intel Core i5-520 @2.4 GHz
6 GB RAM
500 GB harddisk
Display Non-Glare 1368*768
4 cell battery
Backlit Keyboard
Windows 7 Professional 64 bit

 

Any chance you could upload a video or some images? (via Milestone perhaps). How strong are the hinges? Does the fan spin up often? Thanks for the first impressions.

 

Hello, yes pictures will be great! Did you order with Nvidia graphics?

 

I was just about to ask about this.

Compared to a standard dell laptop (if you have any experience with one - I have a studio 15 I am about to sell to my dad for one of these potentially) is the keyboard significantly better?

I really think I am about to buy it...

 

I bought this laptop but im going to send it back. As i posted in the past the battery is very very poor, in confront of others model like the e6410.
Honestly i'm going to buy that one.
Let me now explain, as our friend posted the battery last about 2:30, but that's what windows says when you turn on the computer, if you start to do something like listening to music it drops and if you watch some video on youtube in this case it will be worst, it will drop too much, sometimes it will last for 1.30 even if you just turned it on and the battery is full.
Our mate who tested the e6410 on considerate load said that it took 5.47 min before the auto shutdown.
Ok you might say that, well the e6410 has a 9 cell battery, instead the 3300 has a 4 cell.....ok let's now do some statistics calculus to find out how would it last if the 4 cell battery become magically a 9 cell:

let's assume that 100% is the best durability that windows prompt which is 2:30.
let's assume that double the cell means double durability so 100% more means plus 2:30.

so the calculus is 1 + 1 + 1/4 (1/4 means plus 1 cell) which is 9/4.
now if we multiply this to the durability of 100% in minutes which is 150min the result will be 1350/4.
The result is 337.5 min, converted on hour it will become 5.625.
Perfect! but that's the best situation, as i told you before as soon you start to load the system it will drop a lot, which is even worst than mine old xps which used not to drop that much from the best scenario with wireless on. Our mate postested that his e6410 last 5.47 on load, and this is not impossible because at this time many models (lenovo, apple, dell) is capable to get that goal, even further without load or wireless off.

So let me advise you, if you ask me if this model is fast, i would say yes it is. If you ask me if im satisfied i would answer you no im not, because of the mono audio(c'mon it's 2010 even mobile phones have stereo audio) and the consume management of the machine (not as good as others models).

 

Ignore statistics. Just do some simple arithmetic.

What matters is the battery in Watt-hours. The E6410's 6 cell battery is rated at 60WHr and the 9 cell is 90Whr.

You have to go digging in the Vostro 3300's documentation to find the battery capacity but the clues are:

Watts = volts x amps so the 4 cell is 41.44WHr and the 8 cell (if you can find it) is 82.88WHr.

Hence, the E6410's 9 cell battery can hold over double the power of the 3300's 4 cell and therefore should run for more than twice as long under the same operating conditions.

Note that youtube type video is very CPU-intensive and will hit the battery performance of most notebooks. The exception is the slow CPUs with low power ratings, but they will struggle to play the video properly.

John

 

Before to get the diploma on software engineering, at the high school i got the electro technician diploma.... so yes i could have done that simple calculus that you did...but see you are not considering real situation, real situation does not mean calculating according to the battery life spec, it means considerating the real battery life per model...which has dependecy on many variables...that's why i skipped that. In fact, i own the 3300 (for a while) and it manages the consumption worse than others models in prorpotion to the battery spec and the most important hardware (cpu, monitor, video chipset and wifi), even my old xps had a better consumption management. To validate this just pay attention to computers with similar spec but from different brands where even if they are similar they have completely different battery life.

So yes in a perfect world where every component class have the same consuption to others of the same class, that calculus would be enough to explain everything. But this is not how things work.
So in this case statistics fits much better than simples electro laws, which are faster to use but do not considerate variables.

 

Just a question, did you bother to turn the screen brightness down?

I've never used a laptop where I had the screen brightness on max. I usually use it on minimum. It's just not really useful when I sit in a classroom (I'm a software engineer as well, along a second degree being pursued in mathematics). Max brightness is useful outside, but I just don't go outside to work on my laptop. If I am working, it's inside in a room-level lighting to dark room.

Any idea what the battery life is like then? I really don't think it will be a huge issue for me because my campus has electrical outlets in just about ever room [most built into tables] and the ones that don't, I probably won't be using my laptop to do very intense tasks during that class (minor web browsing and note taking would be all). I'd also replace the HDD with an SSD I currently own, so I should get a few more minutes that way.

Honestly, I'd be shocked if I couldn't get 4-5 hours out of it using it like I do with an 8 cell battery, which can be bought from Dell in the US. (at 180 dollars, I am willing to wait to see if I need it though... I might see if I can talk the rep into throwing that in for free or at a reduced cost.)

 

with 8 cell battery and just simple web browsing (neither videos on web nor music on web) or word typing you would get 4-5 hours specially with brightness low.