Considering the Dell Studio 15

Jafin

Heya guys,
So last night I discovered when I plugged out my laptop (Dell Inspiron 1501) to bring it downstairs, the Battery icon started flashing, indicating low battery. Thought to myself "Thats strange, maybe the plug wasn't in properly" but when I got downstairs I hit the "Fn" button and the battery button to bring up the battery menu. It said something like 7% power discharging. When I plugged it in the battery status changed to idle. So I have come to the conclusion that my battery has packed it in after almost 2 and a half years of faithful service to me.
This in itself wasn't a very big deal to me as I very very rarely use my laptop somewhere where I dont have access to a socket. But then today I was burning some files to a DVD for a friend and near the end I got a pop up box saying to insert a disc into a writable drive as the one it was using was read only. So now the dvd writer has packed it in.

Anywho onto the main issue at hand (and thanks if you managed to stay awake through my drivel above :P), my 20th birthday is coming up next month and I'm thinking of asking for a new laptop for my birthday and I'll pay half since they're not exactly cheap. Im intrigued by the Dell Studio 15 as I dont want a 17 inch notebook as I find them too large. Now, I consider myself pretty computer savvy, even understanding some of the minor innerworkings, but when it comes down to processors, I become completely lost. There are 3 preset options for the laptop at the moment, one costing E549, one costing E599 and one costing E699, and I probably wouldn't bother changing anything in the customization section.

Im looking at the 699 one at the moment as I dont want something that goes sluggish after a year like my 1501 did before I bought extra RAM. Specs for it are:
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T6400 (2.0 GHz, 800 MHz FSB, 2 MB L2 Cache)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium SP1- English
4096MB 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x2048]
320GB (5.400rpm) SATA Hard Drive
512MB ATI Mobility RADEON HD 4570
So thats it more or less maxed out except for Processor and Hard Drive.
Just wondering do people think this is a good deal? I paid the same for my 1501 in February '07 and that was for an 80 Gig Hard Drive, AMD Turion 64 Dual Processor (Im sure im missing a number in that bit), 1GB RAM and Radeon Xpress 1150 Graphics card.

All I use it for is the web, music, photos and the occasional game (nothing too graphics intensive, but when playing City of Heroes I had to put all the settings down to the lowest and change resolution to 800x600 to get a semi-decent frame rate.) Currently I don't play CoH anymore, but probably will re-subscribe sometime in the future and would like to play it lag free.

Advice welcome and of course if you'd like to suggest any other laptops feel free, though 700 is the absolute max price-wise.

Just a quick thanks for reading and hope I didnt bore you all too much.

Link to the Studio 15 page underneath:

http://ireland.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-studio-1555?c=ie&l=en&s=dhs&cs=iedhs1

eamonhonda

It looks like a decent deal although i got my toshiba recently for 700. similar to the spec on this dell but maybe a little better.
Core 2 duo Processor T8400 2.4ghz
4gb Ram
320 HD
Hd doesnt matter really in my opinion as you dont really want 300 gbs of files on your laptop they are better off on an external HD.
Its a good laptop for your money but you may be able to get something just a little better for the same price.
Check out Laptopsdirect.ie on there you can enter what you want and it will give you a range of laptops that suit your requirements

Alanstrainor

i've heard pretty good things about the dell studio laptops, and the above seems to be a decent spec. I doubt your poor 1501 is fubarred, batteries ware out so thu explains the battery issue. As for the disk drive, i'm not entirely sure what's up with it, but it may not be a lost cause.

I have the Studio 17 myself and it's grand, though I notice they've now updated the graphics on the 15.4" model. The only thing I'd suggest is that if you're inclined to use it on your lap then don't go for the 9-cell battery as it makes it too uncomfortable to use that way - the 9-cell protrudes out of the base That would also be the case with the Studio 15 as they both take the same batteries.

spartacus93

The difference between the processor in the €599 and the €699 is an extra 1Mb of cache memory. Cache memory is basically superfast memory that holds commonly used bits of data from memory so they are ready to be used by the CPU. It is much much faster (and smaller) than normal RAM.

It's not a big factor in every day computing, and as you say you're only using it for web, photos, music, and a few games, you probably won't notice any difference. (Even if you did it would be tiny)

However i probably would pay the extra €100 for the bigger hard drive, extra gig of ram and better processor.

As alanstrainor said, it would be worth looking into repairing the 1501. A new battery and disk drive would be very easy to come by. Wouldn't break the bank either.

Oh and that dell offer ends on 13 / may so don't miss it!

The studio range is a lot nicer than the inspirons

Jafin

Thanks to everyone for the advice. Another laptop has grabbed my attention, the Acer Aspire 6930G

http://www.laptopsdirect.ie/Acer_Aspire_6930G_Laptop_LX.AUU0X.214/version.asp?PID=

The 699 Dell Studio I was looking at, to be honest has more than what I need. Like I said, games I play on the laptop are only casual, I keep most of my gaming to my consoles. And this Acer has 256MB Nvidia Geforce (once again, like the processors, this is jargon to me), but I do know 256MB graphics card is a lot more than what I need for it, so I think going for the 699 Dell Studio would be a waste getting it with a 512MB graphics card.
Another attractive thing about the Acer for me is that it has a Blu-Ray drive. I'm sure like a lot of other people, since I got a PS3 I tend to buy most of my movies on Blu-Ray now instead of DVD, so I would like to have a Blu-Ray drive in the laptop I'm gonna be using for the next few years (hopefully!)

Basically just want to know if anyone as this laptop and their thoughts on it, price-wise, build-wise etc.

PS, for those who suggested getting the 1501 fixed, purchasing a new laptop is something I've been considering for the last few months anyway so I'm using these breakages as an excuse to get one :P
Thanks for the advice though.

Dibble

Hi Jafin,

I'm looking at buying a Dell Studio 15 laptop (669 euro) http://ireland.dell.com/ie/en/home/Laptops/laptop-studio-1555/pd.aspx?refid=laptop-studio-1555&s=dhs&cs=iedhs1

and was wondering did you buy one in the end? If so, any feedback would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Dibble.

Jafin

Hi Dibble,

No I didnt get that laptop in the end, I went with the Acer Aspire 6930G and bought it from Amazon.co.uk for just over €600, the real selling point for me that clinched the deal was that it had a blu-ray drive, and I must say the picture quality on the screen, even for dvd's and pics is way better than my older laptop, but I cant compare that to the dell studio 15 as I have never seen one up close.

Psygnosis

Checkout the dell.ie/outlet I got a 17" Studio for 599
with a p8400 processor 4gb of mem

Jafin

Psygnosis wrote: »

Checkout the dell.ie/outlet I got a 17" Studio for 599
[IMG]file:///C:/Users/a/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot.jpg[/IMG]with a p8400 processor 4gb of mem

You have to publish a picture on an image hosting site like photobucket and then put in the direct link or image code, you cant add one from your hard drive to a forum post.

Dibble

Cool, thanks guys.