Dell XPS M1330
The XPS M1330 is the second Dell laptop I’ve owned. The Inspiron 9400 put me off buying another Dell - for the wrong reasons really. I didn’t want another high end laptop with poor battery life, and at just over £1000, the XPS M1330 seemed like a good choice. At 13.3″ it’s portable and packed with features.
Specification
- Core 2 Duo T7300 2.00GHz
- 13.3″ WXGA White-LED display (1280×800)
- 128Mb NVIDIA® GeForce Go 8400M GS
- 2Gb (2×1Gb) 667MHz DDR2
- 160GB 5400rpm SATA hard drive
- 8xDVD+/-RW Slot-Load DVD drive
- 0.3 megapixel camera
- Fingerprint reader
- Intel 4965 AGN Wireless-N Mini-PCI card
- Internal Bluetooth 2.0
- Vista Home Premium
Also in the box
- 2 x 9 cell 85WHr Li-Ion batteries
- AC adaptor
- Recovery CDs
- XPS sleeve
- In-ear headphones
- Expresscard sized remote control
Impressions
The first thing I noticed about the M1330 was how thin it is. It’s about 1.5cm thick at the back, and tapers down towards the front. The keyboard’s a standard laptop keyboard and there’s plenty of room to rest your palms while you type.
The display is clear and vibrant. I opted for the better screen which meant I only got a 0.3MP webcam, but a screen’s used a lot more than a webcam - so it was worth it. It’s much use at brightness levels lower than 6/8, but the resolution is good for it’s size. There’s an inbuilt GeForce Go 8400, which is more than enough for light gaming, but don’t expect to run FEAR at maximum detail.
Battery life is very good. With the screen brightness to 3/4 and WiFi on, doing web browsing and word processing the battery lasted for 5 hours 24 minutes, which could be extended by reducing the screen brightness.
The keyboard and touchpad are as expected, there’s plenty of room to rest your palms while you type. The media buttons are a very nice feature. Whereas on the Inspiron 9400 they were physical buttons infront of the touchpad, on the M1330 they’ve been moved to the top edge between the speakers and the power button. The physical buttons have been replaced by touch sensitive keys which glow when you press them.
Connectivity on the M1330 is impresive. There are two USB ports - enough for an external mouse and hard drive, aswell as Firewire, VGA and HDMI out. Dell also included a multi-format card reader. 10/100Mbps ethernet is included, but surprisingly Dell left out a modem (does anyone even use 56k anymore?). The M1330 comes with an Intel AGN Mini PCI card, Bluetooth 2.0 and an infra-red receiver for use the the remote control, which slots into the ExpressCard slot. The remote control sounded like a gimmick at first but it’s actually pretty useful. If you’re watching a video and lying down, you can can navigate around and control the volume.
I was stung by Dell’s MediaDirect feature on the 9400. It was dark, I pushed the MediaDirect button instead of the power button. Instead of giving the user any kind of confirmation or checking whether you’ve juggled your partitions from the factory default, MediaDirect just de-allocates the drive letters from all partitions except C:\, then creates a second partition at the end of your drive and installs a stripped down version of XP which Dell calls MediaDirect. I had to spend an hour recovering my partitions. My advice is to delete all partitions on the hard drive, then re-create them as you want. That way, there’s no danger of starting MediaDirect by accident. It doesn’t do anything Windows Media Centre can’t do anyway, it’s just a Dell branded version.
The webcam is better than I expected. For the occasional conference on Skype or MSN 0.3MP is an ample resolution. There’s an LED which glows blue when the webcam is in use, so there’s no danger of anyone watching you pick your nose without your knowledge.
Dell went through a phase a while ago when they stopped including recovery CDs, but instead copied an image of the default installation to a hidden partition of the hard drive. While this made it easy for novices to restore to factory settings, it also took up a considerable chunk of the hard drive. Included with the M1330 were recovery CDs for all of the pre-installed software. The wait time for the M1330 was much longer than Dell quoted when I ordered. When I ordered the Inspiron 9400 it arrived five days after I placed my order. Due to apparent problems with Dell’s production line, the M1330 took 69 days to arrive. To compensate for the long delay, Dell offered me a £100 refund which made up for the wait.
Benchmarks
The XPS M1330 achieved 1267 in 3DMark06 and 4611 in PCMark05. It calculated 1 million digits of Pi in 27 seconds, and also played FEAR quite well at 1024×768 with no anti-aliasing or anisotrophic filtering. Quite impressive for a mobile GPU.
Pictures
Click any of the pictures below for full size versions.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Links
Notebookforums.com
Extreme Overclocking forums
Notebookreview forums
Conclusion
The XPS M1330 is light, good looking and has great battery life. The build quality is exceptional and despite the wait time, I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a portable, yet powerful notebook. If you need a case, the 14″ Be-ez La Robe case designed for the Apple iBook fits like a glove with the 9-cell battery.
September 23rd, 2007
What do you mean? Of course it's flat.
September 23rd, 2007
Your keyboard isn’t flat?!
September 23rd, 2007
There a bump in the centre of your keyboard, curved upwards very slightly.
First pic you took illustrates this clearly: http://leghumped.com/images/1330_keyboard.jpg
September 25th, 2007
Looks like the camera lens distorted the picture.
November 24th, 2007
Beside all the advantage, there is one big disadvantage at the XPS 1330: The keyboard gets hot which create difficulties to work smoothly on this laptop! The palms getting nearly burn .
November 24th, 2007
Sounds like you have something stuck in the fan. Mine's on for 12+ hours per day, and the keyboard never gets too hot to type.
November 29th, 2007
I have one of these - bought it off ebay (new) for half Dell’s price. Worked well out of the box. Lightweight - fits in a small bag. Absolutely beautiful screen but niggles.
Noisy - High pitched whistles (I believe from the processor) - unpleasant when quiet.
- Extremely loud and unacceptable charging whistle. If you sleep in the room where you work (e.g. student, travelling salesman) you can’t even with earplugs. Extraordinary can’t imagine what Dell were thinking of.
Cheap metalized plastic case wich is rubbing off after one mnth
Weird keyboard - need to hit keys too hard for comfortable typing. Otherwise end up with missing letters from words.
A criticism of Microsoft really - with the screen resolution 1024 x 800 the new Office 2007 has a ridiculously large ribbon and icons which doesn’t appear to be customisable - reduces working screen area. If you do lots of wordprocessing - get a bigger screen.
November 29th, 2007
The only thing I’ve noticed is the whistle while charging. My Inspiron did the same thing. I usually charge it during the day, but I can see how it would get annoying if you had to charge it at night.
November 29th, 2007
Hi,
I am about to place an order for this XPS 1330. I need to install XP on this, as I do not want to waste my time on Vista. I have seen users breaking their head for drivers on this machine for XP.
Please anyone can post a step by step procedure for installation of XP on this? (like how to deal with SATA HDD? How to deal with sound drivers/ finger print drivers on XP etc)
Thanks in advance
November 30th, 2007
SATA drivers would probably need to be installed during text-mode setup. There seem to be quite a few drivers at Dell's site.
December 24th, 2007
hi
i need to buy laptop of dell
but i am affried of screen which is di-mish we con’t work for more time
and about the cost , its high i think because they were the direct dealers they use to sell for low price .wht do u say?
is there any discounts on xmas ,i need intel 2 deocore , graphicalcard &web cam,ram 2 etc ,can u help me .
wht abt the colour?
December 24th, 2007
The screen’s plenty bright enough to see clearly in bright sunshine.
They stopped selling a lot of colours due to problems with the finish. Black looks good though.
January 14th, 2008
I just found this simple solution: link
You just have to power off the system and hit the mediadirect button again and it will reboot into windows. Phew!!
January 15th, 2008
I found out that there is an option on your System Setup… which allows your system to run as IDE and not SATA… that way you can install XP… as of the drivers, you need to google them up… i'll be checking this post in a few days… if you need assistance with the drivers, let me know… they were given to me by a tech support agent (who i consider so far the more knowledgeable people all over Dell)
January 18th, 2008
this laptop is the perfect one,
but as u mentioned above the only problem is the whistle while charging it.
its perfect for games I installed Call of duty 4 and its workin like charm!!! with the highest specs…
Crysis is good at medium specs but still u need to decrease the shader a bit.
and after installing ubuntu I cant access the direct media partition, any ideas I dont feel searchi for a solution
over all its the best so far.
thnx for ur cool post.
January 18th, 2008
Why would you want to access Media Direct anyway? It’s just a stripped down version of XP.
January 18th, 2008
The only thing I like about Dell is their monitors. I’ve currently got a Dell 24 inch and its mint. but as a gamer and mad about overclocker, Dell machines always seem to fall short for these kind of thing. To tell you the truth I’m superised that you can get it to run Crysis in medium. Whats the average FPS?
January 19th, 2008
I can’t remember the FPS to be honest. I didn’t really get the laptop to play games, and I only installed Crysis to benchmark it. If you’re in to gaming, you shouldn’t really be buying a 13″ laptop. I also have a server with a Lian Li cube case which would probably be great for gaming.
February 26th, 2008
i have this notebook for one week, mine has 1 gb ram, 128 mb 8400, 1.66 core 2 duo
the touch-pad get too hot, is this common or it's a problem ?
i think it's slow on vista …. i want to install my win xp pro, but will everything work under xp ?
like dell media button, or finger print, can i trust the drivers on dell site ?
March 28th, 2008
I have the same complaint. The touch pad gets too hot for comfort. The surrounding are is warm but the pad is beyond acceptable limits.
May 4th, 2008
How in the world do you get that slot out of the right hand corner to replace it with the teeney remote?
May 4th, 2008
It's spring loaded.
A word of warning though - Don't, under any circumstances try to put a mini-cd in the slot loading drive. I had to use two knives to fish one out.
May 4th, 2008
It’s spring loaded.
A word of warning though - Don’t, under any circumstances try to put a mini-cd in the slot loading drive. I had to use two knives to fish one out.
May 13th, 2008
Over the last couple of weeks, this has developed an unknown fault which causes it to crash. Dell have been out and replaced the motherboard, GPU and heatsink, but it's still happening.
June 12th, 2008
Is it possible to install a 64 bit version of Vista on this Specific laptop, and have all the appropriate drivers, and if so wil the machine support more than 4 gigs?
June 12th, 2008
Probably not, since it has a 32 bit CPU
June 13th, 2008
Is it possible to install a 64 bit version of Vista on this Specific laptop, and have all the appropriate drivers, and if so wil the machine support more than 4 gigs?
June 13th, 2008
Probably not, since it has a 32 bit CPU
July 6th, 2008
Do you know how to make the screen as bright as it was when the computer was plugged in. That's my only real problem with this computer - on battery power, I can't make it as bright.
July 7th, 2008
You can change the brightness by holding Fn (next to the windows key), then pressing the up and down arrows. On Vista you can set the default brightness in Control Panel->Power Options->Adjust display brightness.
July 10th, 2008
Until that time I have not read about it
September 10th, 2008
Small update (resolved shortly after it started happening actually):
Dell fixed the laptop after sending an engineer out three times, replacing the motherboard twice, the graphics card, display and RAM. It would have been cheaper for them to give me a new laptop, but if it works I'm not complaining. =)
October 22nd, 2008
hold down f2 on system boot. go into bios and go to the display category. hit enter. There are 2 options for the brightness maximum settings. For A/C power and for battery power. adjust it there.