Digital Trends

Dell XPS M1730

March 11th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Battery Life

Sadly, awesome performance and battery life go together like oil and water. Even though Dell has outfitted this model with a large 9-cell battery, its battery life is still poor, which isn’t surprising. We tested battery life at the default settings, which is the LCD at half brightness, WiFi enabled and the onboard Ethernet port disabled. We also disabled the keyboard backlight, for kicks. We then played a DVD movie until the battery died, which was one hour and five minutes. We don’t expect these nuclear-powered notebooks to have good battery life, so note that we’re not exactly complaining here, but merely pointing out the obvious. If you buy a notebook like this, you should expect to have it plugged in all of the time.

Media Direct

You can play music, movies and even look at images without even turning the M1730 on, which is awesome. Just press the little Media Direct button next to the power button and the Media Direct program starts, even when the PC isn’t running. It’ll let you watch movies, listen to music and so forth. We like this feature a lot, and wish more laptops had similar functionality.

Logitech LCD

We’re not big fans of the Logitech LCD, as we noted in our review of the Logitech G15 keyboard. It’s not that it doesn’t relay useful information – it does – but we don’t see the point in looking down at an LCD when we can just see the information on the screen. We did find it useful to set it to show CPU and RAM utilization, however, and think it’s cool that Dell has integrated it into the notebook’s chassis. It’s a shame however that the text in the display looks antiquated and blocky, which stands in stark contrast to the otherwise sleek look of the M1730.

Conclusion

As gamers and enthusiasts, we have to say the M1730 pushes all the right buttons. Its combination of performance, custom lighting and useful features make it a wholly impressive machine with very few faults. We can nitpick here and there but Dell has done a fantastic job with the M1730. The only feature that really bothered us was the small touchpad, but its accuracy is excellent. We won’t complain about battery life, as that’s like buying a Ferrari and whining about its poor gas mileage. This is a notebook that goes on your desk and stays there.



Pros:

• Very good performance
• Lots of useful features
• Cool lights

Cons:

• Small touchpad
• Overclocking makes fans loud