Brian S. Tucker

I posted a few days ago about my Vista experience on my HP Pavillion laptop. I received my new Dell XPS M1710 laptop last night and thought it would be interesting to share some of the improvements. Here is the core configuration of the XPS:

1. Intel Core 2 Duo T7600G 2.33 GHz 4 MB Cache (Note: G is able to overclock)

2. 4 GB 677 RAM

3. 512 MB Nvidia Graphics Card

4. 100 GB 7200 RPM hard drive

5. Windows Vista Ultimate.

The first thing I noticed on this laptops is that it's not as heavy as my HP and the power supply is smaller. I was pleased to say the least. Dell installs a bunch of extras and only gave me a single C:\ partition that I don't like either. So, after taking a quick look, I used the cd's by Dell to rebuild the laptop the way I wanted it.

After using it for 12 hours now, this thing smokes! I mean this thing seems to be able to handle anything I throw at it. The T7600G processor is the ONLY Core 2 Duo processor that allows you to overclock your processor from the BIOS. I can overclock to 3.16 GHz and tested a few levels to see what happens.

At 3.16 GHz the system really moves, but the fans are on overtime to keep the processor cool and despite the noise, the system does get hot. This might be ok if I was going to really push the processor for a specific need, but for everyday use, it's too loud. I settled on 2.83 GHz and there is no extra fan noise and the processor sill flies much faster than the default 2.33 GHz. Speaking of fan noise, there really is none at this setting. This is a very quiet laptop for all things considered.

Below is a shot if the Task Manager. There are a few things to note. I was running 5 Vitrual PC images (1 Vista, 1 XP, 1 DC, 2 SMS servers) and where the RAM drops off whas where I closed one of the server images. Notice the processor utilization? Everything opens quick in the images and there is zero delay with some room to spare on the memory for another image plus some if needed.

One thing to notice is the total RAM at 3325 when I have 4GB installed. There are several writeups on this, but this one is pretty good. This does not thrill me that I am out 675 megs of very expensive RAM. But, nothiing you can do about it unless you get the 64 bit version of Vista that will use the entire 4 GB's.

 Another interesting thing that everyone seems to be hung up on is "what Windows Experience Index (WEI) do I have?". It seems that this is a bit misleading from everything I have read and can have lower values even though you may have better hardware. For example, my HP laptop has 2GB 533 RAM and the subscore was 5.0. Now I have 4 GB 677 RAM and my subscore drops to 4.7 on the XPS. I don't know why and I don't care because I know I can do more with 3325 MB of RAM than I could with a full 2GB. The hard drive also went down a point from the HP, interesting because the hard drive in the HP was at 4,200 rpm and this one is at 7,200. I don't get the metrics.

The M1710 has lots of USB ports (6) and I can even plugin my SD card from my Sprint 6700 Smartphone to transfer data... That's sweet! The only thing I have to get used to is the keyboard. It's kind of small and Dell could have made it a bit wider. It's going to take a while to get used to it.

The eye candy of the XPS is the LED display.... it looks pretty cool in low light.. You can change the colors in a utility to about 16 different shades. A little fluff, but for a total price tag of $5,200... I should have something fun right?

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