by Ken Moody

Created on: February 28, 2009

Upon graduating high school, my parents let me choose a laptop for my graduation present. My brother already owning the Dell XPS M1330 and raving about how good it was, decided it would be a good choice to purchase its big brother, the Dell XPS M1530.

Style/Design

The M1530 is a very sleek and sexy computer. It sports a brushed "magnesium alloy" chassis and the back of the screen is a matte finish that comes in black, dark blue, pink or red. The single barrel hinge on the screen is a lot sturdier and sleeker than the standard two hinge design on tons of other notebooks. It really is a much more impressive sleek design rather than some of the older Dell notebooks that look like big plastic boxes. Also, the M1530 has a slot-loading disc drive which makes the computer seem much more sleek and streamlined. The machine isn't as thin or as light as the smaller and thinner XPS M1330, but the tradeoff of weight and size for a larger screen and more powerful components makes it a good mix of portability and power. The only thing I would like offered is backlit keyboard.

Performance

My M1530 never lags even when under the heaviest conditions thanks to the Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processors with a clock speed of 2.5 GHz and a 6 MB cache. The 320 GB hard drive rotates at 7200 rpm which allows for lightning fast data access and boot times. For gaming performance, I would highly recommend upgrading the nVidia 8400M GT to the8600M GT as it is a faster GPU and has twice the memory as the 8400M GT. With the 8600M GT I can play almost every single game on the market without a hiccup. Also it can support higher resolutions if you dock you computer to a separate monitor with a higher resolution than the standard 1440x900 resolution of the laptop screen. Lastly, depending on what you are doing, you can get about 3 hours with the standard battery, and probably near 4 on the most conservative power settings.

Comfort/Webcam

The keyboard layout on the M1530 is rather comfortable and easy to type on, but is no better than any other laptop keyboard.
The track pad is nothing special, but it works like it is supposed to. One thing I really like is the LED backlit display is significantly brighter than a traditional CCFL display that is on most other notebooks, making it much easier to read outdoors in the sunlight. The LED display supposedly requires less energy to run, but I doubt the difference is more than 15-20 minutes. Built into the Screen is a 2.0 Megapixel webcam and stereo microphone

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