As my old seventeen inch HP laptop was dying a slow death after almost 5 years of daily abuse, it was time for a new machine. There are plenty of choices out there from the cheap ACERs to insanely expensive MacBook Pros and everybody tries to convince you that their machine is the best out there.
After some research and asking around all my IT friends, I came to the conclusion that Dell might be a good choice so I started digging deeper. Working in the Graphic Design / 3D Graphics industry I needed a fast laptop with a large screen and long battery life for the client meetings. Once I found the Dell Studio 17 laptop, my search was over! Featuring an Intel i7 820QM Quad Core processor, 4 GB of RAM, 500 GB hard drive, 17" screen and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 1GB, this machine seemed to have all the power that I was looking for and all of this for a reasonable price. At this point I was convinced that it would be the best choice but I wanted to touch and feel one before ordering. Unfortunately no store around me had one in stock so I ended up buying one without actually seeing it. I felt out like I gambled buying it but it proved to be a winner.
When I received it in the mail I was pleasantly surprised to notice that the whole package was lighter than my old HP laptop. Once the box was opened the pleasant surprises just kept on coming! The laptop was looking better than the pictures on the website and it feels great to the touch. My fears of it feeling cheap and poorly made were dissipated in an instant. It feels great to touch, light and easy to hold. The whole exterior seems very well designed and all the features seem very well thought out. Even the power supply is small and light and comes with a rubber strap to keep your cables together. The battery design proves again that the Dell design team thought this product through. By having a raised profile it acts both as a handle to grip the laptop from and as support to elevate the laptop from the desk, allowing plenty of air flow underneath the laptop thus keeping it very cool even after prolonged use.
After a full charge of the battery I finally turned on the laptop. Another pleasant surprise, it's extremely quiet! It took a little while to load Windows 7 but that seems to be the norm with all the Windows products... The screen is brilliant and the gloss coating seems to increase the intensity and richness of the colors displayed. Another feature of this laptop that I simply cannot be without is the full keyboard. Keys are as large as on a regular keyboard and having the numeric pad on the right makes typing so much easier. Above the keyboard is a strip of touch sensitive buttons that are back lit and extremely sensitive. The touch pad seems to be great too, allowing you to control the scroll and zoom by multi touch technology but my personal preference though was to get a cordless laptop mouse that I carry all the time in the laptop bag. The only drawback is that you will occupy one of the only two USB ports on this laptop.
Finally, I decided to unplug the cord and see how long would the battery last while working on the laptop. What I noticed is that the screen dimmed a bit from the state it was when plugged in. Power management through both hardware and software make this seventeen inch screen laptop run for well over three hours. I could not believe initially how long was I able to continuously work before I needed to plug it in!
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