Dell Studio XPS 1640 15.6-Inch Obsidian Black Laptop - Up to 3 Hours 8 Minutes of Battery Life (Windows 7 Home Premium)

Favorable Review:

Okay, so how many laptops can you find with a 15.6" screen, 1080p resolution, and a decent graphics chipset for under $1000? Not many! This laptop met all three of these needs for me. It came with enough RAM that I don't need to upgrade it until the 8GB of SODIMM modules become ridiculously cheap. The video chipset M96XT (AKA Radeon 4670) has pretty decent performance [...]. There are just way too many other laptops out there that have 1080p screens and an Intel GMA chipset, or low resolution 1280x800 screens with decent video chipsets. This laptop has both high resolution and a good chipset.

I recently took it to a LAN party to play Team Fortress 2 and it ran beautifully with all the settings turned up to high (60fps+). My last laptop died because the CFL backlight failed, with the LED backlight that should never be a problem. It's also super bright. I usually have it set to a quarter of the brightness and it's still pretty bright.

If you don't like the disk I/O speed (I think it's fine) you can always put a SSD in this as it's a standard SATA disk drive. There are USB ports on the left AND one eSATA/USB on the right, so you can use either one.

My laptop actually did have a gigabit network adapter (not the 10/100 listed here) but no jumbo frames support :( Typical with Broadcom.

Oh, and Windows 7, 64bit is amazing. You have the full 4GB of system memory and 1GB of video.

Cons?:
No scroll lock button, no pause/break button. Not sure how if there is some hidden Fn shortcut to get these. But who uses these really? There's no Fn num-pad, but really, I never used that. The wireless enable/disable switch is a capacitive touch button right above the keyboard. It's easy to accidentally hit it and turn the wireless off and not realize it. 

 

Critical Review:

I have had nothing but problems trying to use iTunes and sync my iPhone with this laptop. Of course, Dell blames Apple and Apple blames Dell. In the end, who loses? The consumer. Don't waste your money on this.