So then first a little background after moving a few hundred miles away from my main computer I was left with a acer aspire one netbook, while for web browsing was ok it struggled like a chain smoker at everything else even loading iTunes was a no no, and photoshop more like photo-forget.
So I went on the hunt for a pretty beefy laptop with a few spec's that I wanted and would not be swayed on so it had to have a HDD that span at 7'200 rpm, screen size of at least 15" with a 1920x1080 resolution, memory of over 4gb with speed in excess of 1333mhz the video card I wasnt to concerned about as the main role would be processing my photos and the cpu well I7 was in mind but I'd looked at I5 aswell, anyway after a couple of weeks of looking under every stone on the interweb and nearly pulling my hair out I decided to look into a dell even though I loathed them after all the horror stories I had heard. I hit them up on there online chat and told the representative what I was looking for after about 10 minutes he came back to me and showed me the studio 15 laptop as it was the only model which ticked all my boxes and after a few hours of looking at reviews I went for it and had ordered one with the specs as follow's
Now the best part how much you reckon, go on have a guess and now have a heart attack at bang on £800 (happy bunny here)
Now as you can most likley see I had a few extra bells and whistles put on like the red lid, and the led backlit keyboard. So I ordered it on the 27th of september and I wont take up space with the 5 weeks of waiting to get it delivered but as it was mostly a custom build and not off the shelf I accepted it and waited so the 2nd of november comes and I get a brand new laptop and a massive smile that it's came, so lets have a look at it;
As you can see it is pretty big but not as big as I was expecting, there is also a teeny tiny web-cam on top of the screen its a 2mp and does its job, a even smaller led comes on to let you know your been watched now a note about the keyboard as there more later on about it, it is backlit and its a god send not a gimick however its not on all the time so if your watching a movie it fades out and switches off after a minute, the keys also have a rubbery feel to them and type very well and are extremely responsive which is a plus, there are two speakers sat under the grill at the top of the keyboard there apparently srs premium sound certified well htey also do there job, they can sound a tad tinny at the top end of the volume they lack any idea of bass and no amount of software will cure that but again for watching the odd you-tube video there ok (headphone for me though)
There the external monitor button, wifi on/off, battery meter, brightness down, brightness up, backlight for keyboard on/off/50% dimmed, mute, volume down, volume up, skip back, skip forward, play/pause and eject for the dvd drive, the keyboard layout is like most other laptops with the exception been the function keys which in most laptops you have to press the FN button aswell, with these you press and they work and to get the F keys (F1~F12) to work you have to press FN so back to front instead of following the norm which I like as I dont have to press two buttons to mute the sound just one.
Right here you've got the right side which has the following a express card slot with a sd memory card slot under it, the dvd slot loading drive, usb port no.1, the power jack and the on/off button. The dvd drive can be upgraded to a blu-ray drive but for the extra cost I opted not to have it, now I know some people are rather anal about the sound of there optical drive so Ill have to say it is a tad on the noisy side while accessing the disk not ear deafening loud but an irritation no less. By now some of you may have noticed that there's no led activity lights at all, so dell in there wizdom have made the ring of light around the on/off button either a solid white glow or if you press FN and H it becomes the HDD activity light (which is why its off).
Round on the left side we have a HDMI port, an vga port (note, only one can be used at a time) the usual ehternet jack, two more usb ports to make the total three !! the top usb port is also an esata port nifty me thinks, a fire-wire port, mic and two headphone jacks. Now a slight concern of mine that combined esata/usb port if you have an esata drive that means you only have two remaining usb portd left so order an external usb hub as Ive already ran out of usb ports, after been spoilt with a desktop its a stark wake up.
I wont bore you with pictures of the back or bottom, suffice to say there a heap of air vents there and one big one at the back, now there has been some reports of cooling issues with the previous 1557 model my 1558 model seems to have no issues at all and while I have ran some basic tests there not an indication of what every unit should be like so here we go after I got windows 7 up and running the way I like it (no more dell bloatware thanks) I ran prime 95 on all 8 cores to get it working then loaded up furmark for the graphics now bearing in mind we have a I7 cpu and a 5 series gpu I was interested in the result I left the laptop on a desk for 30 mins and watched the temperatures spike the cpu would not budge over 95c on any core and the gpu topped out at 90c I used hw monitor and gpu-z, I know they seem high but in real world applications it'll never be that high and the cpu and gpu regularly idle at 50c and hover around 70c when doing photo-shop work. Its also note worthy to say the hottest part is around the air vent on the rear after I heard reports of the touch-pad been to hot to touch, well mines nice and cool.
I don't have any more tests but have found it hard to notice I'm on a laptop when running light-room and photo-shop and processing images there's no slowdown's or stutters at all. There is also no battery tests as every one can get more or less time out of one, Ive recorded about an hour and half of normal usage for me which involved image processing while listening to iTunes while web browsing and have the brightness at 50%. While its not spectacular this is a I7 laptop so I was prepared for no battery life so a non issue for me as it was bought to be a mobile desktop. And last but not least that lurvley 1920x1080 screen there is a reason I left it till last its just jaw dropping-ly good there's plenty of space on screen and the colours are just there compared to what I have seen on other laptops. The only issue I have for me is the damn brightness of it even at 50% it can be used as a lighthouse.
Build quality well been a dell its fairly sturdy in the sense that nothing's fell off yet there no sqeaks but the screen is a tad on the flimsy side IE pull on side and it bends a little as its all plastic but apart from that should survive for a year or two.
So that sums up my rather long winded effort, it is my first review so I know its not perfect but thought Id let every one else out there who might be looking at grabbing a laptop what's out there.
