M1210: Some battery and car reader questions

Hi All,

Thinking very seriously about getting the Dell XPS M1210, but have a few questions I would like to ask existing owners;

1) The XPS M1210 seems perfect in everyway except weight and battery power consumption. Can't do much about the weight I'd imagine, but just wondering what sort of times people were getting out of their batteries (especially the 9 cell), and what was the configuration of their laptop? According to the review here of the 1210 they were able to drain a fully charged 9 cell battery in just under 3 hours, with what I would consider to be some pretty stock standard usage. Ideally I would like to be able to get 5 hours out of a high capacity battery, but failing that I don't think I would want to be going under 4 hours.

2) The Dell site (as well as everywhere else) mentions that there is a 5-in-1 card reader, but I am yet to find what formats are supported. In particular I need support for compact flash type I & II for my dSLR. It seems that no manufacturers includes compact flash readers now which is a shame, especialy as Digital SLR cameras almost exclusively use that format.

Thanks very much for you input.

 

I'm not sure about the answer to your first question, but for the cards supported:
MS, MS Pro, SD, MMC, xD

That is the standard cards supported on the new dell systems.

 

Thanks SouthernGirl, that takes a bit of shine off the M1210. Seems that is the standard for most manufacturers now. The Asus W5F offers the same as the M1210 and is around half a kilo lighter and seems to be more efficianet on battery use. If I want the Nvidia 7400 upgrade then the Sony SZ premium looks better as it is also around half a kilo lighter and better on battery consumption, although I would have to mortgage the house and sell my first born to be able to afford it.

 

well the battery consumption all depends on what your doing with it. According to Dell you can get almost 8 hours of battery life, im assuming thats watching a DVD using Media Direct, with a dim screen. Now if your burning DVD's a 2-3 hour life sound right, but if your word processing, id think you could get 4-5 hours, on wireless internet id think around 4 hours or so. Im getting one of them, I think the battery sounds great. Yes the sony may be better, but the M1210 is ment to be an extreamly powerful, and extreamly small notebook, for its size and power you cant expext ultra long battery life, although its not that bad.