Studio 15 or not studio 15?

I am looking forward to getting a decent laptop for around £700 and the studio 15 has kept cropping up with real good specs.

I was able to get 4gb ram, intel centrino 2, backlit keyboard,ati dedicated graphics all for under
Then i came to this place and heard the far cry studio 15 owners are making about various issues

My question is : is it really that bad?

I plan to make the notebook last for atleast 4 years (though uni) and if it isnt and i wont even consider it

XPS is too expensive

But here is a great HP, give me your opinions on this aswell please

Biggest problem are dimensions which is wierd considering HP is 14inch

HP 33.4 cm (L) x 24.0 cm (W) x 3.4 cm (min H) / 4.0 cm (max H)
DELL 356x25x262mm

 

The Studio 15 is a good machine. It has a few minor annoying issues, but no deal-breakers, at least not for me.

The eject button on the touch-sensitive media panel tends to stick when you first boot for about 5 minutes, but after that it works fine.

Also, the speakers are not great quality, and the IDT audio drivers make them even quieter than usual, but this can be easily fixed by simply uninstalling the IDT drivers and letting Vista install its own HD audio drivers.

It's a good machine, and I recommend it. That seems to be an excellent price for what you're getting, including the ATi graphics and backlit keyboard.

 

I really like my Studio - its a very nice laptop, the best i've had probably.

I can't believe how cool it runs (temp), its 27dC right now and the WLED is absolutely amazing. I give it a definite thumbs up. A friend at work also has and i've just bought another for the mrs as we got a refund on her broken laptop (the broken one wasn't a studio).

I initially bought her a HP from tesco on an awesome offer. It was very well spec-ed up and it looks quite nice but it was very noisy, ran pretty hot and the hard drive was making a REALLY anoying whine/ high pitched noise so we returned that.

However, £700 really is XPS territory. To put it in prespective, i wait for dell to do good deals here in the UK. I just bought a Studio 15 (our second one), with a P8600 CPU (the latest chip) 2.4ghz, 4gig, 320gig HDD, WLED, bluetooth, lid design cover all for £500 when it should have been £700. Dell had a free shipping offer + £150 off and i used quidco.co.uk which give 6% cash back and you can find a 10% off coupon code from somewhere like vouchercodes.co.uk - all that really brings the price down.

So doing the math, the £909 XPS 16 which IMHO is f-in sublime looking and a pretty hefty beast, with 6% quidco cashing back a 10% off coupon code comes in at £765!

 

Good hearing from a person who a thread about all the issues
So they arent really deal breakers then... does the vista eject button work atleast?

XPS territory? The thing is, XPS studio have a huge design flaw by which the screen blocks the air vent resulting in bad heating and awful battery life.
M1330 is too expensive and doesnt have the latest processors or decent graphics
Maybe i might wait till a decent coupon pops up

 

That isn't a problem unless you set the computer flat on a desk. If you purchase a 9-cell battery or laptop cooling pad, you won't have that issue.

 

Yeah...the only reason I'm fed up with my Studio 15 is because it's genuinely broken, and it's got some issues that only I seem to have. So don't expect everything to go as wrong as mine has.

If you need to eject the disk while the touch-sensitive button is nonresponsive, you can also use the Fn+F10 keyboard shortcut, or open My Computer, right-click the DVD drive and select "Eject".

 

The Studio 15 is a good machine with some awesome specs and an amazing price...BUT...it has a lot of quirks. If you do decide to go for it, just be prepared for a not-so-refined product.