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So my old laptop broke after taking a hit, luckily, the HD was not damaged and all my data was intact, although, if it was broke, it would have been more of an inconveniance then anything, since all my stuff is backed up.

I went for a Dell seeing as how they get good reviews quite often, and the laptops were within my price range. So I went for an Inspiron 1525, with the following specs:

Inspiron TM 1525 (N0652507)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T5550 (1.83 GHz, 667 MHz FSB, 2 MB L2 cache)
2048MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x1024]
Internal Keyboard Uk/Irish (QWERTY)
Integrated Intel® Graphic Media Accelerator X3100
160GB (5400RPM) SATA Hard Drive
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium – English
56.6k V.92 Capable Internal Modem & Adapter – UK
8x DVD+/-RW Optical drive, including SW
Dellâ„¢ Wireless 1395 802.11b/g Mini-Card – Europe
1Yr Limited Warranty – Collect & Return
1 Year Base Warranty
65W AC Adapter
6-cell 56WHr Li-Ion primary battery
2.0 Mega pixel web camera
Midnight Blue Colour with Microsatin Finish
15.4″ Wide Screen WXGA+ (1440 x 900) Display with TrueLifeâ„¢

All this for a tidy sum of £470 incl. delivery.

Ordered on the 18th June, the ETA was 2nd June, but this got delayed to the 17th July :o. I gave them a ring and was told Dell was affected by the fire at a major battery supplier and there was a shortage of 6 Cell Batteries. Surprisingly, it got delivered to me on the 4th July, a delay of 2 days is fine with me.

I wiped the Vista install and nLited the SATA drivers into a Win XP CD and installed XP Pro \o/. Dell also gave the XP drivers on their drivers cd, which meant my downloading a torrent of drivers was pointless lol.

So far I’m enjoying the laptop, seems very fast and snappy, the C2D, 2GB RAM and 160GB HD outspec my old laptop by a long way. Also, the play/pause, stop, fast forward, rewind touch controls are a nice touch, but the volume control leave much to be desired. I also decided to sacrifice the ability to play proper games on this laptop for the sake of better battery life, my old laptop had an ATI x700 which was capable of playing FEAR at decent graphics

The good things about this lappy, more battery life, I got 2.5hrs on wifi w/ full brightness, very quiet apart from the occasional burst from the fan, and packed with connectors Two (!) headphones ports are included, not sure why lol, along with a HDMI port. It’s a shame the VGA port isn’t a DVI one but oh well. I also opted for a webcam which I dont really need

There are some drawbacks to the laptop though. The volume control is terrible, it’s a hardware based touch control, which means to turn the volume down, you have to hold the button down for a bit. This gets annoying especially when a scene is loud. My old laptop had a hardware based scroll volume control, which I still miss lol, it just makes life easier with a scroll wheel volume control.

Dell also decided to use Alps touchpad, which is completely featureless apart from the standard scroll emulators on the side. My old synaptic touchpad had edge scrolling, which speed up the harder you held your fingers down, touch zones to emulate specifc actions when a certain area was pressed, among other handy features, which again, made life easier.

Another thing I had a problem with today was putting a USB Flash drive in the USB slot next to the power plug :o It just wouldn’t go in because my USB drive is a bit wide. The power slot being half a cm to the right (or a smaller USB drive ) would’ve solved this issue.

A problem I noticed yesterday was with the LCD screen! It turns out, after much googling, some of the LCDs Dell uses has the problem that makes it look as if someone gave the screen a wipe with a wet rag It’s *very* noticable on white/light/vibrant backgrounds and a big annoyance. The LCD make I have (Samsung SEC3157) is widely affected by the problem, although not as badly as the other manufacturers. The only winner in this seems to be LG, who are much praised in forums for not having the problem with their LCDs. I sent Dell an email who replied saying I should phone them and that they will offer me a refund and they don’t do LCD replacments Hopefully by calling them, I can worm my way into some kind of deal where they send me a new (heck, even a refurb) LG LCD, I replace my LCD and return the old one. I really don’t want to wipe my install and my data , reinstall Vista, and pack the whole lot to them for an LCD replacement If they don’t offer me any solution, I might just have to learn to live with the problem I don’t think I will find good laptops with specs like these in my price range from other manufacturers.

Heh, that is a long post…..overall I’d rate this laptop 7/10. Will jump to 8/10 if I get a better LCD