I've finally retired my Dell XPS M1730. The M1730 was, and remains, a very powerful machine but I'd only ended up with that beast because of bad timing. When I needed to buy last time there just weren't any reasonable machines in the upper mid-range. The available systems were either just a little underpowered, or you had to go with the overpowered gaming rigs.

The short battery life of the gaming rig has been a challenge though, so I have grown very eager to leave it behind for something a little more reasonable.

I picked the Dell Studio XPS 16, also known as the Dell Studio M1640.

So now it's review time again.

Here we go!

Here is my configuration:

• Intel Core 2 T9800 (2.93GHz 6M cache)
• 8GB DDR3 RAM
• 256GB Solid State Drive
• ATI Radeon Mobility HD 4670 (1GB Ram)
• RGB-LED Display (1920 x 1080 - 16:9 aspect ratio)
• Slot load DVD/CD burner
• Intel Wireless N-Ultimate
• 9-Cell Battery (std is the 6 cell)

The XPS Brand:

When Dell first came out with the XPS line, the purpose was to make ulra-cool gaming machines to compete with Alienware.

My last XPS screamed "I AM A BADASS!" as soon as you saw it! Even the packaging it was delivered with was somewhat over-the-top. It even came with a leather binder for the manual, and an inscribed micro-fiber sham to clean the screen with. When you opened the box, it gave the immediate impression that you just bought something special! The system itself was eye-catching. If you pull out an XPS M1730 in public, heads will turn and jaws will drop! It is so flashy that it may as well come with spinners!

But dell bought Alienware and has phased out the XPS gaming rigs in favor of the Alienware brand. The other XPS was an ultraportable that has since been replaced by the Adamo

All these changes left the XPS brand in a lurch. Recently Dell re-launched XPS as a sub-moniker for the Studio laptop line where it just denotes a high-end Studio instead of being a distinct brand in its own right.

The Studio XPS 16 comes in a plain black box without frills and extras now.

The new machine itself is very sleek and sophisticated, but gone are the flashy lights, complex color schemes, and gaudy logos. Anyone that looks close will still notice the high quality fit and finish, but it doesn't draw the eye from across the room like older XPS models did. Fortunately I have no interest in drawing attention, but if you buy for the "look-at-me!" factor, then get an Alienware instead.

Exterior:

The Studio XPS 16 is very thin and light for a full-size large-screen laptop. It is as thin as the last generation's ultra-portables were, but it still packs a lot of firepower into a small package.

The exterior surfaces are made from that glossy coated plastic that is all the rage these days. Mine is black of course, but you can get it in white or red if you want to spoil it.

The glossy finish looks fantastic, but it is a finger-print whore! You cannot touch it anywhere without leaving prints. Even the touchpad gets prints! You'll find this complaint in every review about this system because it really is THAT damned annoying!

Like the rest of the studio line, this one uses round side-mounted hinges. Because of this, the display doesn't "stand up" on top of the housing like it does on most laptops. Instead it falls off the back covering the rear of the system entirely when open. Because of this, you will need to tilt the screen a little further back, especially if you are tall. Sometimes this angle causes the glossy screen to catch some glare from overhead lights though.

Also, the new hinge design requires that all of the ports be on the sides of the system instead of in back. This cuts the number of ports down a bit, but it does has all the ports you'd expect; except for the odd decision to omit the DVI port. Instead of DVI you have HDMI, DisplayPort, and an old-fashioned VGA port (for projectors). Fortunately you can get HDMI to DVI adapters for a couple bucks easily enough.

Unlike other Studio laptops, this one doesn't put the power button on the side of the hinge, but it does use the space for the battery status lights. This looks kinda cool, but I'd rather have the battery indicator where I can see it while I'm working.

Screen:

Dell has always had phenomenal screens on the high-end laptops, and I've been very fond of their 17" displays for years. I've been using the 17" screens with a 16:10 ratio at 1920 x 1280 for about 8 years now (longer than they've even been available in external displays).

The smaller 16" screen of the Studio XPS gives you the option to switch to the 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio at a slightly reduced resolution of 1920 x 1080. This is the native resolution for 1080p HD TV, which is convenient if you watch movies on your laptop. I personally preferred the 16:10 ratio myself, but since the TV market picked 16:9 we may as well all just settle on the one standard and be done with the argument already.

What I wasn't prepared for though was just how much smaller a 16" screen would be compared to older 17" screens. Not only do you lose the diagonal inch, but the change in aspect ratio also reduces the screen's height considerably.

The screen is fantastic, but I really would love to see Dell offer it in 17" or 18" versions at 16:9. The drop in size is tolerable, but it really does cut close to the bone for those of us that need every scrap of screen real-estate that we can get.

The optional RGB-LED display on this model has gotten rave reviews, and I will tell you that those reviews are NOT overstated in any way!

This is the sexiest laptop display I've ever seen! Well worth the price of the upgrade (about $350 extra).

It is amazingly bright and vivid --So bright that I keep mine at about 1/4th of the max setting. If you turn it all the way up you will get tan, I promise!

The image clarity is fantastic too, and the colors are exceptionally vivid and distinct compared to traditional LCD displays. Keep in mind that I've been using high-end displays for years, and my eyesight sucks to boot; so for me to notice a significant jump is unusual.

My favorite part though is the uniformity of the illumination. The backlight on even the best traditional LCD always has a slight variance in brightness from one edge to another.

All this clarity and crispness is awesome for graphics and movies, but it does have a drawback too... White and black are also vivid colors, so back text on a white background ends up being TOO clear and crisp! This effectively undoes the deliberate blurring (ClearType) that most OSes use for more readable font rendering.

Most people won't notice this effect, but for programmers working in text editors all day this can be a really big deal!

You can compensate for too crisp text by using an off-white background, dimming the brightness, and/or modifying the cleartype settings. If your editor supports it, you can invert it to use a black background with light text -- my preferred solution.

Video Card & Gaming:

I'm not a die-hard FPS guy, but I do game a bit. I can live with slightly reduced detail levels, but I do like my games run smoothly at, or near, the native resolution of the display. I also don't like to be prohibited from playing certain games due to limited video hardware.

My enthusiasm for high-end screens and video hardware is not gaming related: My eye-sight is REALLY bad, and I was still losing a lot of vision even into my late 20's from staring at crappy monitors all day.

So for the last 10 years I've insisted on only the best displays and video cards, more as a matter of personal protection than for gaming.

Also, as a programmer, the tools I use really do benefit from large screens and high resolutions.

I figure that if I'm going to spend 10+ hours a day using a computer, the least I can do is invest in the best display I can get my hands on.

My last several laptops have used NVidia mobile GeForce GPUs, which handle most games well. But I've grown increasingly annoyed by NVidia’s lack of concern for mobile customers. They tend to abandon driver support as soon as the next generation GPUs hit the market (which is about 5 minutes after you buy your laptop). After that, you have to scrounge for hacked up desktop drivers online and hope they are stable enough to use.

I've also noticed a decline in the overall quality of NVidia’s mobile GPUs recently too. In my opinion NVidia is just so focused on the "next big desktop GPU" that they neglect the fine tuning and engineering in the mobile versions.

So this time I decided to give ATI another shot. At least they seem to actually CARE about the mobile market, and they've been doing much better on the high-end than they have in the past.

I haven't played a lot of games yet, but so far it has run everything I've thrown at it as well as my M1730 does. Left 4 Dead 2 just came out, and it runs at high quality settings at the native 1920 x 1080 resolution, though I did turn down the anti-aliasing to 2x instead of the default 4x.

Time will tell for sure, but so far I'm pretty happy with the ATI card.

Keyboard:

This laptop does away with the numeric keypad seen on most full-size laptops. This was necessary because the frame is a little too small, plus they put the speakers on either side of the keyboard instead of the front to allow the laptop to be thinner.

I don't mind the loss of the keypad one bit. Having my hands offset from the center of the screen is more annoying than any convenience that a keypad might add.

The keyboard is white backlit, and it has a very pleasant feel to it, though the action is a little mushier than on past Dell models. The tactile feedback is still sufficiently good though.

One thing I'm not sure about are the slightly oversized keys. This is taking some getting used to. The keys aren't crazy big, but for a touch-typist the subtle difference is noticeable at the outer edges.

My biggest gripe is the return of the dreaded "Apps" key (sometimes called the "context menu key"). I HATE this key on desktop keyboards and I wish the inventor a long and painful death. This key has been blessedly absent from most laptops until now. But the worst is that Dell put the apps key right next to the arrow keys... specifically to the immediate left of the left arrow key. This placement is an outright sadistic move on Dell's part!

Nothing sucks more than "CTRL+SHIFT+Apps" when you were just trying to "back-select" text in your text editor!

Fortunately SharpKeys makes a utility that allows you to perma-kill the apps key via a registry tweak.

Overall I like the new keyboard better than the one on my old M1730, but I REALLY wished they'd just pick a standard keyboard layout and stick with it on all their systems. I hate having to relearn how to type every time I change laptops. Actually, I'd much prefer that they just go back to the old keyboard layouts they used 5 years ago... that was the perfect layout, which is why dell had used that same design for 10 straight years before they started mucking about with new keyboards.

Solid State Drive:

This is by far my favorite part of my new Studio XPS, though it isn't a feature unique to this specific system by any means.

On laptops, hard drives have long been THE performance killer. It takes a lot of power to spin a metal disk around at several thousand RPM, and laptops don't have a lot of power to spare. While traditional drives have gotten faster over the years, the power limitations have kept the laptop versions performing far below that of their desktop cousins.

With solid-state drives becoming a viable option, it is moronic not to jump onboard with your next laptop purchase. The reduced power requirements alone are worth the price tag! But the best part about SSDs in laptops is that power and spin rates aren't an issue anymore. SSDs on a laptop operate at the same speed that they do in desktops!

Dell doesn't offer the "best" SSDs on the market. Mine is a Siemens, which is decidedly a mid-grade SSD. But Dell's price on these is crazy good (only about $300 for the 256GB SSD). Even with the lower-end SSDs the performance will still far exceed even the best traditional spindle based drives.

Since this is THE bottle neck, switching to SSD will improve every aspect of your system's performance. Everything is smoother and snappier. Boot times are amazing with Windows 7 (about 10 seconds if you don't load a bunch of startup junk!). Programs smoothly spring up when you launch them, and local drive searches are outright zippy!

I can't overstate just how much faster the whole system is with an SSD under the hood!

If you can afford the price of the high-end Intel solid state drives, then I'd advise you just buy the dell with the cheapest spinel drive they make and replace it with the Intel SSD yourself. But even if you are on a budget, I still strongly advise getting the Dell SSD.

This laptop comes with an eSATA (external SATA) port, so you can compensate for the smaller sizes of internal SSDs by just buying an external spindle drive to store your music and movie collections. The eSATA connection allows those external drives to operate at full speed unlike traditional USB based externals (and eSATA doesn't add but a few dollars to the price of the external drive either).

Battery:

The default battery is a rather small 6 cell lithium ion. The reason for this is that the chassis is thin and small, so the 6 cell is just what fits. You can upgrade to a 9 cell battery, but to make extra room for the additional cells the battery is taller. The 9 cell battery acts like a stand and has its own rubber feet. This jacks-up the back of the system a good bit.

The extra life of the 9 cell really is worth the upgrade price though.

After two years working on a gaming rig with only about 1 hour per battery, the life on the Studio XPS 16 is great! But this is a high end system, and so it has some power hungry hardware still. For that reason it isn't going to get the kind of crazy battery life that you hear about with more conservative high-end systems, but it still does very well.

With wireless turned off I get about 5 hours on the 9 cell battery. With wireless-n under heavy use I get about 3.5 hours. But with the power-hogging Verizon broadband card I get just shy of 3 hours at best.

Personally I dislike having the back of my system jacked up by the 9 cell battery, but many people do prefer this --it is similar to the angle you get with a desktop keyboard. I personally find that the angle adds stress on my hands, so I've ordered some tall rubberized feet to put on the front of the system to match the height of the battery.

For most people though, the jacked up rear is probably not a problem, so I still recommend the 9 cell battery.

Odd Stuff:

Core i7 CPU:

At the time I bought this system, the Core i7 CPUs have just become available with this model laptop. The Core i7 sounds like a fantastic upgrade, but it is also a major change in architecture. Last time I jumped onto the brand-new architecture was when the first Core Duo CPUs came out. Those were much faster and nicer than the previous CPUs, but they also ended up being a little flaky. It wasn't but a few months after that that Intel replaced Core Duo with the Core 2.

So this time I decided to go with the highest end of the previous generation rather than jump pre-maturely on the i7 bandwagon. Since i7 is out, the Core 2 line has gotten a major price cut too. This allowed me to get the extra-high-end Core 2 at a decent price tag. The Core i7 costs a fortune by comparison, but prices will drop for i7 pretty fast I expect.

If you are buying you should consider the quad-core i7. They will likely be worth the upgrade price over the Core 2, but don't expect miracles here. Most software still can't really unleash the true power of multi-core processors.

IR Receiver:

This laptop doesn't come with the "travel media remote" like many previous XPS systems did, but it is still supposed to be compatible with them. The travel remote is neat because it fits into the Express card slot. No one ever has an actual express card (I have NEVER seen one in person), so storing it in the express slot it is a convenient use of otherwise wasted space.

On the rare occasions that I connect to my TV, the remote is handy and having it stored away in the express slot keeps me from losing track of it.

But when I tried to move my travel remote to the new Studio XPS 16, it wouldn't work!

Eventually I discovered that there is a driver for the built-in IR Receiver, but for some odd reason Dell didn’t pre-load the driver at the factory. The device manager didn't report a malfunctioning or unknown device either (which is the truly strange part), so it was not obvious what the problem was about.

Once I figured it out and installed the receiver's driver the remote worked like a charm. No additional software is needed for the remote (another reason I really like it).

FastAccess Software:

One of the new toys shipping on many newer Dell systems is a software app called FastAccess. This is a face recognition login system. When you go to login, FastAccess will turn on the camera and take a look at you. If it recognizes your face, it automatically logs you in without typing your password. Otherwise you can just type the password as normal. The software "learns" how to better recognize you over time.

It is a neat feature, though not much of a time saver. The recognition is quite snappy, but typing a password doesn't take much time or effort either. Still it is a really nifty feature in that "pure-nerd" way.

The software also has some advanced capabilities beyond just desktop logins, and it does actually work surprisingly well! After a couple of manual logins it was able to pick me out almost every time (as long as the lighting was good).

The big problem though is this thing's insane usage of CPU resources. It sits there chewing up a massive 10% to 15% of my CPU resources... continuously! All the time!

Since it isn't doing anything unless I'm actually logging in, I have no idea what it needs all that CPU power for. I tried turning off all the optional features, but it still sat there sucking down clock cycles like mad.

So I uninstalled it of course. Neat utility or not, nothing is worth sacraficing 10% of the available CPU!

Maybe future versions will fix this problem.

[UPDATE: 6/14/2010] New information (see comments) from the manufacturer suggest that the latest version of the software for FastAccess should alleviate the CPU usage issues. I have not tested this myself though (for completely unrelated reasons, I've had to disable the camera on my system).

Dell has offered pretty much the same keyboard on their laptops for the last 10 years. They have been notoriously high quality with a comfortable layout, full size keys. a decent tactile feel, and reasonable durability. But over the years there has been no more than very minor tweaks to the basic design.

The XPS Keyboard Into

Breaking from the old and moldy, the Dell XPS M1730 (and some Vostro 17" models) now sport a much newer keyboard design featuring a full-sized numeric keypad.

The keypad is a very welcome change for quite a lot of people. These have been around from other 17" laptop vendors for many years, but for some reason Dell just never adopted it before.

This was also one of the features that excited me most about the XPS M1730 too.

The M1730 keyboard has pretty much the same overall feel and construction quality as the older designs, plus it has handy back-lit keys.

The Layout - Short-Bus Keys

But I have a less favorable feeling about the layout of the keys.

On the older keyboards, there were two rows of half-sized keys at the top-right side of the keyboard where most of the special keys reside... delete, home, page-up, page-down, etc. The nice thing about dell's old design was that the keys had the same relative layout as a desktop keyboard in that the insert key was above the delete key, the home was above the end, and page-up was above page-down... in that order.

On the new keyboard, there is no second row of keys at the top.

As you can see from the diagram, all of the special keys are in the same row as the function keys (F1 - F12). This breaks the normal pattern of use for these keys. I thought that this would be something I'd just get used, but after about 120 hours of use I've discovered that the positioning of these keys still annoys me just as much as when I started.

This laptop is marketed heavily toward gamers, so the breaking of the traditional relationships between these keys makes little sense. Games often map commands to these specific keys based on their relative positions so it seems strange that dell would choose to break the traditional pattern here. As a programmer I make frequent use of all of these keys so it does have quite an impact on me too.

No sleep for you hippie!

Another thing that annoys me is that the old "sleep" key (fn + Esc) is absent on this keyboard. Instead they have a new hibernate key (fn + F1). Sure, hibernate is "safer" for your data, but with 4GB of RAM hibernate also takes a LOT of time to get into and out-of.

The first thing most technical and power users do is turn off the "sleep when the lid is closed" feature... yes... that feature REALLY pisses us off!

So this leaves the XPS without an actual "sleep" button or key combination. There is, as far as I can find, no way to remap the fn + F1 key to sleep mode.

If you are like me and aren't going to be leaving the laptop unused for a week, then you will highly favor sleep mode so you don't have to wait 5 minutes before you can pack up and move. Vista is smart enough to power back up from sleep mode and do a formal hibernate if the battery starts to run dangerously low while the system sleeps.

The fact that the system might automatically power up from sleep to hibernate is something you should keep that in mind!.

Laptops run hot very quickly if they don't get good air-flow. If you store it in a laptop bag and it comes on to hibernate, it could overheat itself before it finishes hibernating... I've had that happen with my old Inspiron before, and I'm sure the XPS is more prone to this due to the more powerful components.

For this reason I always store my laptop with the back-vents up, and leave the top open... just in case.

Don't plan on taking any breaks!

And one other minor annoyance for me is the strange location of the pause key. The old keyboard layout had a dedicated key for pause/break, but this one moves it to fn+F12. When you are playing a game and need to take a break, it is quite annoying to have to go looking around for the magic key combination.

As a programmer I run into the problem with the other function for this key, the break command which is used by many development tools. Fortunately the tools I use can remap this command, but command line debuggers and compilers often do not.

Oddly enough, it does sport a dedicated print screen button. Surely it would make more sense to the vast majority of users, gamer and regular folk both, to have pause there instead of print screen?

Touch Pad:

The touch pad is not worth much talking about. It is a standard Synaptics touchpad and is pretty common these days on must about all laptops. It has a shape that is close to proportional with the wide-screen display, and has the expected two buttons and scroll regions. It is also pressure sensitive and has good configuration tools for sensitivity and pointer control... nothing special or new here.

The touchpad does appear very small, but that's just because the rest of the laptop is so big. I've compared it to my old Inspiron and it's the exact same size and shape. There really isn't much room to have mounted a larger touchpad anyway and just about everyone will prefer an external wireless mouse anyway.

The only notable thing about the touchpad is that it has a really pretty LED back-light that causes the giant XPS logo in the middle to glow... and you can set it for  any of 16 amazingly bright colors.

Bottom line:

In general I'm happy to have a real number pad back. I've been using laptops for so long now that I'd gotten used to not having one and no longer miss them. Having it back is like getting to known an old friend again.

On the flip side though, I find that having the main keys offset from the center of the screen is annoying. With desktop keyboards you can physically move it around so you are centrally aligned with the screen,  on a laptop you are stuck with the offset position and end up sitting off to the left of center when using the machine.

I personally prefer the older Dell keyboard designs without the keypad, but that's probably a minority opinion. Most people learned to type on a desktop, and loosing the numberpad really annoys them, as it did me when I first made the switch to laptops. So having the keypad will outweigh any other aspect for the majority.

When choosing a laptop, an important aspect battery life. For me, this is perhaps THE most important aspect, so I'll be spending quite a lot of text on this post.

Battery Life of the XPS M1730

The XPS M1730 gets much better battery life than older gaming systems, especially the original gaming rigs that used hacked-up desktop parts.
 
My particular XPS has:

• Core 2 Extreme at 2.8GHz
• Dual gForce 8700M video cards 
• Dual 7200 RPM hard drives

Here are some numbers from my informal tests:

• Power Saver Mode, no wireless: 2 hours 10 minutes.
• Power Saver Mode, wireless on: 1 hour 40 minutes.
• Balanced Mode, no wireless: 1 hour 50 minutes
• Balanced Mode, wireless on: 1 hour 25 minutes

 I don't test high performance mode because that shouldn't be used with battery unless you are a moron... but when I accidentally left it in high perf mode it got about 30 mins with wireless turned on.

While 1 to 2 hours is still pretty short compared to many other laptops, it is a reasonable amount of time considering how powerful the hardware is.

If you need more than about an hour and a half out of it, you'll want to buy a spare battery.
 
Power Management:
 
There have been tons of advancements in power management over the years, but prior to Vista the OS had limited ability to use those features. The hardware manufacturers were often lazy and so their drivers neglected power management. 
 
But the XPS was built from newer hardware that heavily supports intelligent power management, and most of the drivers are designed to give control of those features to Vista.
 
The result for the M1730 is a system that can scale from very low power states to very high states in very small increments as demand increases. It has amazingly fine control over how much power is being used, when, and where. 
 
Most impressive are the power management improvements in the newer gForce 8700M video cards. 
 
The XPS M1730 can balance power usage against performance much more aggressively and intelligently than with any other system I've ever used before.

Tweaking for more Battery Life:
 
Other than turning off wireless, almost nothing else seems to matter much to battery life on the M1730. Turning off the numerous LEDs, keyboard light, and lowering the screen brightness didn't help at all. The difference between the "balanced mode" and "power saver mode" in Vista also didn't push the time out much. 

So basically, just put the thing in the dell recommended power scheme (balanced) and turn off wireless when you don't need it.  The system will do about as good as it can all by itself.

The Bad.

• Longer Recharge Time:  
   
  Most Dell laptop models have a rapid recharger build-in which allows them to recharge very fast (under an hour on my old Inspiron). Sadly, the XPS lacks this rapid charger. The battery will charge to about 90% rather quickly (45 minutes to an hour), but capping off that last 10% can take another 30 to 45 minutes more.
   
• No Secondary Battery:  Having a secondary battery gives you more time, but it also allows you to swap out the primary battery without fully shutting down or hibernating. With 4GB of RAM hibernating and restarting can cost you 5 to 10 minutes.
   
  If it had a secondary battery, even a small one, it would save me quite a lot of time.
   
• No External Charger:
   
  This has been true for almost all laptops for years now, but it still annoys me.  

Minor points:

• The Battery for the XPS M1730 is shaped funny which makes it hard to fit the battery into most pouches on most laptop bags.
     
• The battery release latch is placed exactly in front of the finger hold making it difficult to swap the battery without turning the system completely over and using both hands.
   
• The Power Supply for the XPS M1730 is huge... like X-Box big! It's about the same size as an external USB hard drive, and a tad heavier. It is so large that carrying it with you is very cumbersome and adds a lot of weight to an already very heavy package.
   
• The power cord is very thick and heavy. It also doesn't fit very well into the power socket on the laptop. Sometimes I've noticed that the weight of the cord alone can unplug your laptop... which is VERY annoying indeed!

Bottom line:

 The XPS M1730 has VERY aggressive power management features. Battery life is shorter than most laptops, but it still can get enough time to be usable for most people. It certainly does better than the rumors would have you believe.
 
 Gaming will run batteries dry significantly faster, but compared to older gaming models the XPS still does quite well.

I recently has to replace my old laptop (a Dell Inspiron 9400; a.k.a. Inspiron E1705).

It was a fine machine and served me well for just over 2 years. But last week all the smoke leaked out through a hole in the video card and it stopped working.

I'm a programmer, but I do quite a lot of my work outside the office. So rather than muck about trying to keep a home and work desktop both setup with identical development environments, I prefer a beefy laptop instead.

I don't travel professionally though, so things like weight and space haven't been all that important to me.  Instead, I want as much power as I can get in my laptop, and so I've always tended to buy very high end systems (usually in the $3000 - $4000 price range).

In researching a replacement for my old system, I became a victim of timing.

Currently it's very hard to get a non-gaming laptop that has any serious muscle. True, there are a few good high-end business and personal laptops, but right now the number of options is small, and all of the systems topped out just shy of where I wanted them to be.

So for the first time, I started looking seriously towards gaming laptops.
I always "look" at gaming laptops of course. I got my start in the industry building custom PCs, and I've always been a bit of a hardware enthusiast at heart. But this was the first time I could seriously consider a gaming laptop as a viable option.

Anyway... I ended up choosing an XPS M1730.

When I was looking for practical reviews about the M1730, I noticed that there weren't many well researched reviews out there, and the few I could find concentrated exclusively on the pure gaming aspects. The reviews totally glossed over most of the really important questions that I had about the viability of a gaming laptop for other uses.

There is also a lot of misinformation out there about gaming laptops in general, and the M1730 reviewers seemed too lazy to investigate and tell you which were true and which were not.

So, I've decided to post a series of mini-reviews about the M1730 from the perspective of a programmer and power user. I'll be covering the more mundane, but very important things that aren't being covered in the mainstream reviews.