You may recall back in November 07 I reviewed a nice new Dell XPS M1330 laptop, I thought 5 months on it was a good time to review how it has held up against my everyday use, and I do make it work hard!

It is my everyday work laptop, as well as a machine when I am at home, so it gets a fairly varied use. Today we will look at the following:

• Durability
• Reliability
• Practicality

Durability
This laptop gets lugged in and out of the office all the time to clients homes and offices and always just in the sleeve that it came with so no over the top protection and it is going well. Other than a few finger marks on the nice crimson red cover and some dust here and there, it is wearing very well. When I bought it I was a little concerned that because it was so lightweight that it might not be the best one to be balancing on my knee while working on another machine or plugging in cables, but it is great! A couple of small falls here and there and it seems to bounce quite nicely! [not recommended though]

Reliability
Being impatient and needing to work fast while at clients I just put the laptop into hibernation most of the time and 99% of the time it comes out of hibernation raring to go. There is the odd occasion where is just won’t connect to a wireless network and a reboot quickly sorts that out, but it is very rare.

Some people have had un-ending problems with Vista but I seem to be one of the more fortunate ones as all my machines are running fine, especially this one. Being a work laptop it gets programs installed and uninstalled for testing and problem solving all the time and that usually slows machines down, but there have been no signs of that yet!

I chose the 9 cell battery for the extended battery life, and despite it being a bigger battery it really is a worthwhile thing to have.

Practicality
Being such a nice small laptop it is easy to carry around, even with the slightly larger battery. The sleeve it comes with means it is nicely protected without having to carry around a full sized laptop bag.

The screen despite being small is big enough to work on for long periods of time. It does require a bit more scrolling but that is easy to get used to.

Summary
Stunning! I wouldn’t go back to a bigger 15.4″ laptop and the XPS machines are better than any other laptops I have played with. On a par with a mac book, both with different qualities! Let’s not get into a mac vs pc discussion here