Dell XPS M1530 Laptop

I'm in the market for a new laptop for on-the-road processing. Anything major would still be done on my desktop machine. This laptop seems to be in a reasonable price range for what I want to use it for. If you use a Dell laptop, what has your experience been with it? My current HP laptop has given me fits since the day I got it.

I have a dell 1530 and it has been giving me fits since day one.

Suggestion: MacBook and don't look back.

My $0.02

rfreschner wrote in post #5424007
I'm in the market for a new laptop for on-the-road processing.

I have a mixed response to this... First, my son is an engineering student and runs a big AutoCad program on his Dell 1530 without a hiccup. It's maxed out with memory and has the biggest hard drive and the best video card that were available at the time he purchased it. He loves that laptop.

That said, for the purpose you are stating, I'd get a Mac.

Slickdeals just had an awesome deal on the XPS1530 last week. I almost got one for portable editing also, but just barely missed out on the deal. The specs on it seem like a pretty good laptop, I would assume it could handle editing pretty well.

I'm interested in this thread also though since I'll be purchasing a new laptop in a month or so.

I've had an Inspiron B130 for about 1-1/2 years & it handles RAW processing & PS7 well. The LCD isn't very good for PP, but there's an outlet for a 2nd monitor.

Thanks for the feedback folks. Macs are definitely nice, but I'm on a lower budget this time around. And, I don't need/want to upgrade all my software at the same time.

rfreschner wrote in post #5424007
I'm in the market for a new laptop for on-the-road processing. Anything major would still be done on my desktop machine. This laptop seems to be in a reasonable price range for what I want to use it for. If you use a Dell laptop, what has your experience been with it? My current HP laptop has given me fits since the day I got it.

I've been using a Dell XPS M1710 for the last 15 months. It was supplied with Windows MCE and the free upgrade to Vista Home Premium 32 bit. I got hold of a 64 bit copy of Vista and have installed that myself. Hardware spec is Core2Duo 2.16GHz, 2GB RAM, 120GB 5,400rpm HDD, 7950GTX graphics. It breezes through photo editing tasks without a hitch. I've shot some stress test videos and uploaded them to YouTube....

http://www.youtube.com …_videos?user=do​dd9999&p=r

Since shooting those I've upgraded RAM to 4GB, which cost me <£40 for 2*2GB. Unfortunately my chipset is a bit old and I can only access 3.3GB RAM but I imagine the M1530 could handle the full 4GB if you wanted.

I'm very happy with Dell products, performance and prices - this is my third Dell laptop since 1998 (my original one is still in use today!) and I also have an XPS 420 PC. I see no need to pay a significant price premium to get an Apple of similar hardware spec. Lightroom is Lightroom and Photoshop is Photoshop, so who really cares what OS you have running behind the scenes?