My New Dell XPS M1530

After a long wait, I finally got my hands on a Dell XPS M1530, which I bought from one of their showrooms in a nearby shopping mall. I thought I would be able to get a better price since I was purchasing it at one of their showrooms, but to my irritation, they wouldn't even give me a free laptop bag.

And what's more is that when you 'purchase' the Dell XPS at the showroom, they make you use the Dell website to do it. I could have done that from home!

It actually cost me MORE to buy it from them since I paid for parking and petrol and toll to get there.

Moving on, the laptop was promptly delivered to my house within a week and I've unboxed it and set it up in my home office (aka 'room'). Have a look at it below:

I run a dual monitor setup as I really do find that it increases productivity and is just plain geeky/techy which I just couldn't resist. Once you connect the monitor to the laptop, it will detect it immediately and ask if you want to extend your desktop or duplicate it on the second monitor.

You can also configure different screen resolutions for the laptop and the second monitor.

I've installed a program called MultiMon to put a second task bar on the other monitor. It's free too.

I also use a relatively cheap Microsoft wireless mouse and I usually listen to my music using my senheisser HD201 headphones because the speakers on the laptop are really soft and not very powerful.

The laptop allows you to connect two headphones at the same time for couple movie watching and although it allows for an external microphone, you don't really need (unless you want to record music) it because the laptop has a built in microphone and web camera as well.

I have this laptop stand from an old laptop which used to run really hot, but it does help with keeping the XPS cool as well, because with extended use, you can feel the metal on the top of the keyboard begin to heat up.

I'll post about the features and some of the functionality on a later post.

Take care!