Friday, May 14, 2010

Review Dell Studio 1558 Laptop

The Dell Studio 1558 is a great looking laptop. It has a squat and low profile that echoes the Apple MacBook Pro to a great extent. The silver body is highlighted with a black keyboard and trim. The build quality is good, with the Studio 1558 having a reassuring feel to it.

In terms of performance, this is a powerful and highly usable laptop. Powered by the latest Intel Core i5-430M and backed by 4GB of memory, we found the Dell Studio 1558 battery loaded up smoothly and ran multiple tasks with ease. What’s more, with 500GB of hard drive space, you’ll be able to store the whole family’s music and movies with ease.



When it comes to connectivity you’ll find the Studio 1558 is a fairly typical laptop, packing in a DVD rewriter, three USB ports, 802.11n Wi-Fi and Gigabit Ethernet port.

The 1558 has three USB ports and a Firewire port, but no eSATA connection. We were pleasantly surprised to find that it has a dual-band wireless adaptor built into it, with support for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11n networking, making it one of the first laptops we've seen that can connect to the latest dual-band routers. It also has a built-in Bluetooth adaptor.

Three 3.5mm stereo ports which can be configured for 5.1 analogue surround sound speakers. The built-in speaker produces reasonably well balanced but somewhat fuzzy sound. The integrated memory card reader supports SDHC, MMC and Memory Stick PRO formats and a 320GB hard disk provides a reasonable amount of storage. We were pleased with the Studio's three hour, 33 minute battery life, too.

Florian Glaser at NotebookCheck posted a review on the Dell Studio 1558 HD4570 15.6 inch Intel Core i5 Notebook . He thinks the Dell Studio 1558 is a very good good notebook due to some very good features. Its batteryt life is very decent with an optional 9 cell Studio 1558 battery and the full HD screen produces great picture with good contrast and brightness. On top of that the build quality is excellent, it offers various color options and lit keyboard (optional) and it also delivers all the right connection ports, decent sound from integrated speakers and the 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5-520M makes sure the whole system runs smoothly.

Specifications

2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 520M Processor
Intel GMA HD 4500M HD graphics
320 GB HDD at 7200 RPM
4GB DDR3 RAM
15.6-inch TrueLife LED Display
In built 2MP webcam

This is a great laptop for the price. Only Dell was considered for this purchase as I only trust them to build such a high quality machine, and they did. Wish i would have ordered the backlit keyboard, would have been a little fancier on the eyes and nicer for night time useage. With that being said, the platform for Windows 7 is highly reliable over XP & Vista. The wireless card we bought is pretty much rock solid, it rarely drops off connection. Upgrading to a solid state drive will help someday and be nice too for less power consumption & less heat. Added bluetooth controller was a key feature for extra peripherals. Facial recognition software needs a lot of developmental help on the software side of the configuration, it slows us down a lot! But what a sharp laptop!

One of the other things that makes the Studio 15 a pleasure to use is that rather than cluttering up the chassis with touch-sensitive controls, it built the multimedia controls into the row of function keys, just as Apple does with its Macs. Our only gripe: the hinge, which contains the speakers, is wide, and pushes the display farther back than we’d like.

The 9-cell battery on our configuration creates a bulge on the bottom of the laptop, making the notebook (a reasonable six pounds) slightly awkward to carry and a relatively heavy 6 pounds. Those who care more about looks and portability than endurance should stick with the 6-cell battery.

The following test is a pre-sample of the new battery for Dell Studio 1558 with reason, with a combination of brand-new Intel Core i5 520M CPU and the same all-new CPU Intel GMA integrated HD video solution. So that “poaching” the notebook in the entry area of the series and should be comparable in price not much more equipment than the level of his predecessor are. As already observed at the Core i7 architecture but it is also at the core i5 Dual-core CPUs with a huge performance boost to be expected, but there is a whole range of new features incorporated, which only recently, the i7 chips from zero to the peak of have catapulted CPU charts.

The Dell Studio 1558 uses the same 15.6-inch LED backlit panel that it has been using for some time. Color representation and brightness are quite good but viewing angles can be problematic on the vertical plane. The 1366x768 resolution is fairly typical of what is seen in this price range. Users can elect to get an optional high-brightness or WLED panel as well as a higher resolution panel. Those working in graphics will probably want the WLED panel for its higher color gamut. All versions still carry a glossy coating that makes it difficult to use in outdoor lighting.

It’s hard to make out the hardware, but the 1558 Touch appears to have a Core i5-520M CPU, Windows 7 Home Premium, 3GB of RAM, and 320GB HDD. The 1749 Touch has the same processor, 3GB of RAM, and 320GB HDD. Presumably, the 1558 is a 15-inch machine and the 1749 is a 17-inch notebook.

Connections at the rear of the Notebook would help keep one’s desk clean and free of cables, however the deep overhang of the display when open prevents anything from being able to be connected. For a GPU, Dell Studio 1749 battery and has outfitted the Studio with an ATI Radeon HD 5650 with 1,024 MB of GDDR3 memory. The keyboard Dell Studio comes fully-featured with a full numeric pad, which makes number input or playing games easier. When pressing on the keys firmly one is able to feel the give that the keyboard has, the bending is most visible above the optical drive. Only users with a very light touch will not notice anything to this effect.

The new i5 CPU generation from Intel has convinced us without reservations, or rather the Core i5-520M chip used in our test configuration, whose performance data is geared towards the most high-performance Core 2 Duo CPUs, and which is to be found on the level of the Core i7-720QM in applications without quad-core optimisation.

Also there's the newly integrated graphics solution, the Intel GMA HD, that now sits directly on the CPU unit, which in places provided astonishing performance. The true potential will indeed be seen in hybrid solutions, that is to say the combination of integrated GPU with an independent graphics card, whereby the switch, depending on performance needs, can quickly and easily take place. In this way, multimedia notebooks can combine high performance with high dell laptop battery performance and so their reputation as all-rounders can finally be without limits.

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