M1330 Purchase!

Looking at getting one today- trying to decide between a 64gb ssd and the 320gb 5400rpm hard drive.......

What do you guys/gals think? Worth the extra- with 320gb comes to about £900 / with 64gb £1600.

I liked the fact my bro's sony vaio with 32gb ssd was silent- how would the dell compare with ssd and without (much slower, louder, hotter??)

Thanks

 

I feel it is too expensive right now to indulge in an SSD drive. Further any thing less than 100 GB (Useable Space) is too less.

Yes, the regular hard drive will be slower and louder compared to SSD but that is not a fair comparison in the first place.

 

The hard drive in the M1330 is quiet anyway, any noise is from the fan not the hard drive.

If you are considering going with a 64Gb drive (which isn't going to leave you a lot of space to put much on it) why are you not considering a 7200rpm as an alternative, it's quicker!!

Edit: Plus surely you should be considering an SSD for the speed increase not the noise levels?!!! (At that price anyway!)

 

I can’t tell you much about the noise level of SSD vs normal HDD. But the HDD I have is not very noisy. With the FAN working most of the time, HDD noise is hardly noticeable , therefore don't buy a SSD because of noise .

If you decide not to buy a SSD, then don’t buy a very large HDD from DELL. They are over priced ! you can get a larger 7200RPM HDD for a much better price from outside. Installing in a new HDD is very easy and it will not void warranty.

 

£700 seems a bit steep. But then again I did order my m1330 with none of those fancy features like LED, draftN, Bigger HDD.

 

Would be a lot cheaper to get the cheapest hard drive Dell will give you, then upgrade yourself...

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=14&subid=910

The 64Gb is out of stock here but other sites have it.

 

Cheers guys- Is the m1330 a noisy machine then? Is it not silent when in windows? (i.e not playing games / encoding)?

Is it that easy to swap the hard drive then- does it not invalidate warranty? Can dell media direct (or whatever it is) still be reinstalled / used?

Would it be possible to say- get a 320gb hd with it, then swap it out with a ssd when I wanted one, and then use that 320gb in a ps3 or something along those lines?

 

Right, thinking of ordering:

M1330

T7500
2gb ram
320gb hd
wireless N
Led screen
Windows Premium

Total £896.10

Is this a good price? Any other discounts I can get?

Am I gonna regret the 320gb Hd?

 

Use: XBG5F3LF?W4$SJ for 10% off

 

Go for the SSD if you have $. It's fast, quiet, much less heat generated and save battery

 

Thought I would answer your questions for you

It's not really all that noisy anyway even with the fan on full. (I think some people are very picky and consider any noise noisy!)

Very easy, just take out the 4 screws and pull it out. MediaDirect can be reinstalled easily too however you must boot the disk before installing the OS to setup the partitions. Also I hit it accidentally before it was fully installed and it screwed something up (NT loader missing or something) so had to reformat again, probably best not to touch it till you install the disk once the OS is up and running.

It might even be cheaper to upgrade it yourself, check prices for hard drives on scan or ebuyer etc and compare to Dell's upgrade prices. I would still say go with a 7.2k as it's quicker than 5.4k, unless you really think you need the space (if this is your primary machine etc). Also bear in mind that you can get a 500Gb external drive dirt cheap now too that is great for general storage.

 

Think i'm going off the idea of ssd- can always buy a 64gb for cheaper ~£600 compared to £800 dell want and swap it over.

Is this a good price though for the machine? Will it get cheaper over xmas?

 

Might even want to try eBay, I ordered one from here yesterday to replace one of the M1330's Dell sent us which was faulty:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Dell-XPS-M133...QihZ019QQcategoryZ177QQtcZphotoQQcmdZViewItem

Cheaper than Dell, loads of warranty, and you'll even have it before Christmas

 

Does changing the hard drive invalidate the warranty? Does using a 7200rpm drive cause any heat issues or shorten the battery life?

 

From the basic physics, mechanical force always doesn't have 100% and some of the chemical energy (electricity) will become heat from the spinning...

Meanwhile, the "wasted" chemical energy is the part of battery that can be used by SSD to run...