Dell Studio 15

sock puppet

I'm looking at getting a laptop for college. I'm thinking of the Dell Studio 15 at the moment. They have a special offer on so it comes to €549 for the laptop.

It's specs are:
Intel® Pentium® Processor T4200 (2.0GHz, 800MHz, 1MB cache)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium SP1 (64 BIT) - English
15.6in Widescreen High Definition (1366x768) WLED with TrueLife
3072MB 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [1x2048 + 1x1024]
250GB (5,400rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive

It also has has an 512mb ATI HD 4570 graphics card.

I'm planning on using it for stuff like Office, internet, some programming, and maybe watching dvd's. I've read some reviews of it and they say that it isn't the most portable laptop going. Is this in comparison to other 15" laptops or to laptops with a smaller screen? I won't be carrying it around everywhere so it isn't hugely important to me. Also is the graphics card a big drain on battery life? Would something cheaper like this
be more suitable?

Thanks

Oafley Jones

sock puppet wrote: »

I'm looking at getting a laptop for college. I'm thinking of the Dell Studio 15 at the moment. They have a special offer on so it comes to €549 for the laptop.

It's specs are:
Intel® Pentium® Processor T4200 (2.0GHz, 800MHz, 1MB cache)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium SP1 (64 BIT) - English
15.6in Widescreen High Definition (1366x768) WLED with TrueLife
3072MB 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [1x2048 + 1x1024]
250GB (5,400rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive

It also has has an 512mb ATI HD 4570 graphics card.

I'm planning on using it for stuff like Office, internet, some programming, and maybe watching dvd's. I've read some reviews of it and they say that it isn't the most portable laptop going. Is this in comparison to other 15" laptops or to laptops with a smaller screen? I won't be carrying it around everywhere so it isn't hugely important to me. Also is the graphics card a big drain on battery life? Would something cheaper like this
be more suitable?

Thanks

I've a studio 15 for just under a year and love it. For me, it's probably the best design Dell have put out so far. Much prefer it to my girlfrinds XPS 1530. My spec is slightly different in that I've the 2.1 ghz and 1440x900LED (Excellent screen, but i'm not sure if they still offer it. The downside the ATI isn't very powerful and the internal speakers are woeful compared to the XPS's, also touch buttons are a bit too sensitive. I paid about 500 for mine and that was off the Dell outlet site. Three people I work with bought the same machine form dell outlet and all love it.

sock puppet

Thanks for the advice. Nah the performance of the card doesn't worry me. I'm just wondering how much impact it has on battery life. I play all my music off my mp3 player so I'm okay with a poor speaker too.

shortys94

Would it be better to go for 4gb of memory? Would it make much difference?

Voodu Child

shortys94 wrote: »

Would it be better to go for 4gb of memory? Would it make much difference?

Vista runs fine with 2GB for the average (non-power) user. 3GB is a nice luxury. You'd be upgrading to Win7 for free, which has better memory management than Vista. So you're laughing with 3GB tbh, I wouldn't bother paying the extra for 4GB unless you have a strong reason to.

fmul9798

You need to check the diff. between the 1 year old spec mentioned above and the current model which is a 1555, has subwoofer (albeit small), and the ATI 4570 graphics which is quite good even for gaming. It is a very different HW spec to the previous Studio 15 model.