Dell XPS M170 Notebook Review

Dell is a great computing company. They make one of the nicest computers in the industry, but they also charge an arm and a leg for it, and their customer service isn't that great. The Dell XPS M170 which is replacing the Gen 2 is a great gaming notebook. Entertainment is this notebooks middle name and it features just about everything you could possibly want multimedia wise. Just a few of the high end features this notebook offers is a Pentium M 2.26 GHZ processor, a gig of RAM and a powerful 256 MB GeForce video card. Of course with a notebook of this calibur it gets mighty hot also so make sure you try and give it a break if you can, although it is powerful enough to stay on for lengthy periods of time.

The XPS M170 is very expensive. It retails for about $3,500.00 which is a thousand dollars more than the normal desktop replacement machine. I don't know about you but there are plenty of other entertainment bound laptops out there that do just what this one does, this one just looks prettier. Dell did put top of the line everything in their new laptop, but they only added a gig of ram, for $3500.00 I would think they would at least go 2 gigs. I did myself upgrade to 2 gigs, not that it's needed, but helps a bit. I still don't see this laptop selling that many with it's price as high as it is.

Some of the specs on this machine include a 256 MB video card made by GeForce and a surprisingly long battery. The video card is high end and it can support any game up to date. Games like Doom III and World of Warcraft will run in circles on this machine. That's the basic reason the price of this machine is as high as it is, although everything in the machine is high end. The battery though is what surprised me the most. I tested on mine and with a DVD playing it lasted about 2 hours. Without the DVD it lasted about 2 and a half hours which is longer then most desktop replacement notebooks. I like that a lot about this machine.

The Dell XPS certainly passed a lot of tests against rival powerhouse notebooks. The HP zd8000 which is another powerful multimedia desktop replacement was challenged by the XPS M170 and was right there. The upgraded zd8000 features a 256 MB video card by ATI and a massive 2 gigs of RAM which is what I really would have liked to see the M170 use. Overall though the M170 is as powerful as you'll get in the gaming notebook. Test this machine with any game and you will see excellent performance. With the 80 GB hard drive that comes with the notebook, expect the storage level to be very high. I gave this machine a 7 out of 10, which was mainly because of it's price. If it was a little lower I would have certainly gave this a 8 or possibly even 9, because I did like the overall outlook of the notebook.