Dell E1505 Review

I recieved my Dell Inspiron E1505 last night, and here are some first impressions (specs of my system are in my signature.):

Feel:

The feel is pretty solid, it does not seem like a computer that will just break the instant you drop it. The keyboard is ok, nothing too spectacular. Although, Dell would do well to make the keyboards have more of a depression rate (press down further basically). The buttons on the "mouse" feel kinda cheap, but they work just fine. The touch pad is pretty sensitive, and the driver for it is great, lots of customization options. The two scroll bars on the sides of the touch pad is especially useful.

LCD:

I have the WSXGA+ with truelife, and I'm just relieved that i didnt have massive defects in terms of light leakage and so forth. Otherwise, I won't hype the screen too much. It looks quite large for a 15.4", so those of you opting for the 17" inch should perhaps reconsider? The resolution is decent.

Heat/Sound:

The laptop will get quite warm after a while, its not like its burning, and its still comfortable enough for you place on your lap or touch. But it does get warm on the underneath, and on the palm rests. (typical).
As for the fan, there are a few modes and speeds. On the lowest speed, the fan makes basically no sound, just a small hum. The 2nd level is ok, and the 3rd level makes it sound like a desktop. Although, its bearable, so I won't complain either.
The DVD/CD burner it came with runs with typical sound levels. Although, I wish it were a bit quieter

Speed:

The core Duo 2500 is just amazing. It handles multitasking as advertised. For example, I was installing Mathematica, Nero Ultra 7, and Microsoft Office '03 while running System Mechanic 6 Pro and playing music. Almost no slowdowns as far as the system was concerned. Multitasking on this machine is amazing. I was monitoring the system resources usage, and it hovered around 50-60% for each core throughout this process.
The overall responsiveness of the system is also great, but it requires for you to get rid of ALOT of the bloatware. Dell kinda screwed up on this respect. It took me a full hour to get rid of all the programs, and files/registries left behind, so it is annoying. More or less, this causes the lapotop to not be ready out of the box.

Gaming:

I still have not yet had time to play any games on this yet, so more later. Although, I dont play highend games, usually just Warcraft III, so I don't know how my review will be.
Although I must say that the ATI X1400 driver's management tools are quite comprehensive.

Wifi

Standard, I picked up a signal without trouble.

Price:

Dirt cheap, if you read my specs/pricing, I believe this is one of the best prices for the grade of components it contains.

Alright, so more on the E1505 Later on, enjoy! I highly recommend this system!

5400 RPM

Probably should've opted for the 7200, oh well, im decently satisfied. the noise from the HD is also pretty low.

Alrite, so for a long due edit.

About the video card, its pretty good. But I think it does tend to get a bit buggy if it starts to overheat or something, causing the screen to have black lines running across it. but thats after like 5-6 hours of constant gaming (yes, I was bored)

I havn't run any real benchmarks, but I did play Doom 3. Its great, on HIGH settings, it could run at 55 FPS at a consistant rate no matter how many explosions were going on onscreen. I tried ultra, but it warned me I would need 500+ video ram, so I decided not to strain my GPU that much.

For the price tag on the X1400, I think it performs wonderfully.

now that I've had the E1505 for almost 2 weeks now, I can more fully comment. The system is great. It does what I want it to do which is the word processing/surfing/music wihtout a hitch. And for my type of gaming which includes Doom 3 on the high end, its a easy no sweat job for the CPu/GPU.

2 GB Ram is not really too useful for those considering it, but i guess it would be good for "futureproofing."

Alright, thats all for now, hope this helps.

no, i am not overclocking, we might have different speeds on doom 3 due to other factors like cpu/ram. but i am sure im not overclocking my x1400 on high settings.

I am running it at my native resolution (WSXGA+), so that would be 1680 x 1050

perhaps that difference in proc speed makes enough of a difference? who knows... *doubt it tho* the other thing may be I am using Omega drivers, and you arnt?

sory sory, i was mistaken

i am running it at the same res as urs, under high settings. it is going at 40 FPS when i am moving, 30 FPS when i shoot, and 60 FPS when I am jus tstanding still looking around. my bad