Dell Vostro V13 review I have been lucky enough to win a Dell Vostro V13 in a competition generously run by radio station 2GB (www.2GB.com.au) and Dell (www.dell.com.au) and with this new laptop delivered to the office, I’ve taken the opportunity to write a small review below.
The Dell Vostro V13 is beautiful thin brushed aluminium laptop with a quality professional appearance for those who wish to have an attractive stylish laptop for business or personal use. The price is very good and by not resorting to glossy plastic and bright glowing lights, it gives the impression of a much more expensive laptop, being actually very reasonably priced. The build quality is excellent with everything fitting together precisely and perfectly with reinforced zinc hinges and a solid sturdy impression and feel. There is no creaking or flex in this laptop which makes it very satisfying to use.
The screen is very good, plenty of resolution at 1,366 x 768, bright and with a matt finish (a personal preference of mine as I dislike being distracted by reflected glare when working in various environments). The keyboard is somewhat average and lacks dedicated volume keys though it comes with a generously sized multi-touch touchpad. The mono sound is loud and clear, great for VOIP or online conferencing. Weight is nicely portable at 1.6kg, helped by the lack of a DVD drive. This machine came with Windows 7 and I was very pleased to find the built-in software to be minimal with barely any bloatware installed. It does come with backup and recovery software which is always useful.
It comes with a USB port, a combo eSATA/USB port, ethernet and VGA output, SD card port, ExpressCard slot as well as microphone and headphone jacks. Dell always seem to put a lot of effort into their AC power pack design which, as always for Dell, is excellent with this laptop. A disappointing design characteristic of this laptop is the battery which is in-built, just like an iPhone. This means you cannot purchase and bring an extra battery for long flights or conferences and such. While the built-in battery lasted just over a respectable three hours for simultaneous office and wireless internet use, it is an unfortunate limitation on this otherwise very portable laptop. The processor in this model is a 1.3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 with a 500GB 7,200rpm HDD and 4GB of RAM which is plenty for the tasks most people are likely to give it. Naturally if you’re looking for video editing or computer gaming capacities, there are laptops built more specifically for those purposes.
For business and internet tasks, the Dell Vostro V13 cruised along quite happily. At T7 Training Systems, we recommend getting lots of RAM and the fastest available hard drive with laptop purchases, which is how this laptop came to us (4GB RAM and 7,200rpm hard drive). Thank you once again to 2GB and Dell for this well equipped and quality laptop. Nick
Nicholas Jankovic Looking for Microsoft Office training in Sydney? Click here for our courses. |
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