XPS m1530 - UK - The Dell Experience

Hey guys,

I'm going to give the U.K guys a quick run down of my dell experience. I am going to cover ordering - shipping - the laptops pros and cons.

[Spec Ordered]

XPS 1530 - Business Model - £774.22

***Note - After checking back at a later date, this offer is no longer available***

Order Times

Order Date: 22/04/2008
Estimated Delivery Date (on or before this date): 20/05/2008
Actual Shipment Date: 24/04/2008

Dispatched:

28/04/08 10:30 *** DELIVERED
28/04/08 06:56 BPO - DARTFORD ORDER ON DELIVERY.
26/04/08 07:02 BPO - DARTFORD FIRST BOX SCANNED INTO HUB.
26/04/08 07:02 BPO - DARTFORD ORDER COMPLETE IN DEPOT.
25/04/08 13:18 WWI - HINCKLEY ORDER DISPATCHED FROM HUB.
25/04/08 13:18 WWI - HINCKLEY FIRST BOX SCANNED OUT OF HUB.
25/04/08 13:18 WWI - HINCKLEY ORDER COMPLETE IN HUB.
25/04/08 13:18 WWI - HINCKLEY FIRST BOX SCANNED INTO HUB.
24/04/08 17:00 RAHEEN DEPARTED EMF.

[Additional two days due to the weekend.] 6 days[-2] = 4 days from production to my house.

Pros

- extremely powerful for its price range
- runs adobe suite cs3 and 3dsmax like a dream
- didn't encounter grainy screen issue
- looks great!

Cons

*- The 'fans' on the laptop start to run really loud at random times.
*- The DVD drive is quite loud
*- This may just be me, but the dell touchpad can take abit of getting use to. I have to bend my wrist far too much from the keyboard to use it.

* = compared to my amilo v2055 [really low budget laptop]

- lack of a well prepared driver pack for windows xp. Having stripped the system of vista and downgraded [or upgraded if you like ] to windows xp, I felt the lack of driver support from Dell was rather poor. Yes, I did eventually obtain all the drivers [thanks to the guys on this forum!].

Currently I have 43 processes running, 7 of those are related to some form of wireless setting, 2 relating to sound, 4 relating to the touch pad and 1 related to the finger printing system. Really it should only be 6 or 7 process, not 14!

- 4 different partitions, only 2 show up in xp [local:220gb / recovery:10gb]..seems like i'm missing 20gig

Once I've done my exams I'll run a few benchmarks, test a few games to really see how powerful this machine is!

My main concern is the random noise level of the fans. If their is a fix for this please do share - This is because I intend to use my laptop at university, I don't want to be sitting in lectures and suddenly my fans go AWOL. I'm pretty sure that my fellow students won't be impressed with the excessive noise disturbing them *embarrassing*

All-in-all you will not find a better laptop at this price range! well worth the price.

 

Wow. Sounds like you got it good all around! :smile:

You can try SpeedFan or i8kfangui, but read this post first.

 

haha, cheers pixelot.

I'm currently working through the undervolting guide. I am managed to get 12x value down from 1.2500V to 1.1125V - original temp: 70 73 [after 10 minute test] current max value 73 / 74 [after 30 minutes] - values any lower than 1.1000 = crash

- On another note i've come across another problem. Say, for example, im randomly doing stuff on the laptop and an application crashes, usually I get no error or no unrelated errors [not from my previous machines]. But, now I've started to experience this error:

http://www.febooti.com/images/iezoom/iexplore-application-error.png
error 'The memory could not be read' and you click either OK or cancel...any ideas what thats all about? I hope I haven't any bad RAM - could it be related to sp3??

 

Well, I'm not an expert, but I'd say to make sure the modules are seated properly, and run Memtest.

 

thanks again pixelot

In regards to the undervolting. I noticed RMClock throttles your cpu based on usage, for example if the cpu is idle it uses SuperLFM [0.6ghz] but say I do any basic task that requires the cpu it'll jump from 0.62gh to 1.25..then 1.45ghz etc etc. My query is that if the cpu is constantly jumping about is that a good thing? Or have I got it completely wrong and this is an entirely normal thing but I've never seen it before?

 

just an update

- after undervolting, the fans still tend to, randomly, get loud..just not as loud. Is there a way I can completely silence them [like its original state]

-memory test shows no errors

 

just to add to my post, all temps on the laptop are as follows:

ACPI: 49 [max] - current [41]
core 0: 44 [max] - current [41]
core 1: 48 [max] - current [44]
GPU core: 63 [max] - current [63]
HDD: 38 [max - current [38]

 

any ideas then >_<