Dell Studio XPS 1647 Review

Our house was burglarized in early January, and we lost a whole bunch of portable electronics stuff. Our old fully loaded Studio XPS 1647 too was a victim of this theft.

After that I was looking for a good laptop to replace it …. and finally ordered a Dell Studio XPS 1647. It took over a month and a half for Dell to ship the laptop and I finally received it last week. Its a pretty good laptop. However, Dell officially supports only one HDD on it. I wanted to use a SSD (solid state drive) as my primary drive for the OS, and then have a second HDD as secondary drive for bulk data storage. So, I bought a 60GB SSD drive and used it as the primary drive. SSD makes a HUGE difference in the performance. No more waits. The entire windows 7 installation was complete in less than 15 mins… Its a major improvement in performance.

SPECIFICATIONS
- Intel® Core™ i5-430M Processor (3M Cache, 2.26 GHz)
- 15.6' edge to edge Screen
- 4GB DDR3 RAM
- 320GB Hard Disk Drive
- Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
- ATI Mobility RADEON(R) HD 4670 with 1GB Video Memory
- Slot Load 8X DVD +/-RW Drive
- Integrated 1.3 Mega Pixel Webcam
- Bluetooth
- 6 Cell Battery
- Available in Black Color

Since our review, Dell has refreshed the XPS 1647 with the latest tech, including a speedy Core i7 processor and an ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5730 graphics card.

Dell currently provides instant savings of $224 on the 1647 model of the Studio XPS. Once you plug in a couple coupons from online store, the total price comes to $1,159.99 with free shipping, which is more than reasonable for such a powerful multimedia notebook. However, be aware that this deal expires today, so you’d better be quick to jump on this price.

You know what is the sad about this? – I got Home Premium version of Windows 7 and I’m not completely sure if this is something that is enough for software developer.

Copying everything from was as much as easy as copying from logical disk D to disk E. I plugged Ethernet crossover cable into both of them and ensured that they have different IP addresses and that’s it! High speed computer-to-computer network is ready.

A system this large is only ever designed as a desktop replacement. We've hit more than our fair share of systems like this with ordinary battery life, and the Dell Studio XPS 1647 battery is no exception, coming exactly a minute short of two hours battery life in our full-screen, full brightness video test. Clearly with tweaking you might get a little more than that out of its six-cell battery, but you're still not going anywhere particularly far with this unit.

If you'll pardon the pun, the core difference between this Studio XPS system and our previous contender was the shift upwards from a Core 2 Duo to Core i5 processor, with the performance enhancements that it should bring. We certainly weren't disappointed in this regard, with a 3DMark06 score of 6630 and PCMark05 score of 7157. While the design suggests it's built for business, this is clearly a system that you could throw almost any task at and expect it to handle matters with aplomb.

The 8 cell lithium ion Studio XPS 1647 battery comes from Asus. It's built-in between the huge fans on the back and has a capacity of 78 Wh. The adapter is made for a maximum of 120 watts, so you can work out for yourself that the system consumes more than 78 watts under full load and therefore won't last for even an hour without electricity.

More exact rates will first be possible with our prototype that we'll hopefully get our hands on soon.

This Dell Studio XPS 1647 laptop has been outfitted with the Intel Core i5 Processor. This processor features a four-way processing thread. Basically, this type of processing delegates how much power needs to be sent to each application. By doing so the processor is able to dedicate ample power to high-performance applications while lessening the power to non-demanding programs. This results in a computer that remains highly functional and maintains high performance even when running numerous applications at one time.

The hard drive for this Dell Studio XPS 1647 laptop features a total storage capacity of 640GB, which is the ideal size for those who have an ever-growing media library or those who much store a multitude of files due to editing software. I really enjoy the size of this hard drive, and I feel for the price of this computer you're getting a great deal on storage capacity.

A new operating system on your Dell Studio 1647 laptop! Don’t worry we have all the required drivers here to get you going. By now You would have noticed that most of the devices are not working properly and require you to update their drivers. For your Video device which will probably not work until you install the correct Dell 1647 battery, here are all the Video drivers related to Dell Studio 1647  driver for different operating system.

So simply find your relevant driver and proceed onto the link and download your required file.

We've not hit many systems that have upgraded to Core i5 that we haven't liked, and the upgraded Dell Studio XPS 1647 joins that group nicely. Don't expect to lug it around all day and have the battery last, but besides that quibble this is a nicely balanced, mostly business-centric system.