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Re: Vostro 3460 Owner's Lounge
After having used it some more, I'll leave some more feedback and conclude my mini-review. Performance:
Benchmark numbers are above. I have to say I'm really impressed with the Crucial M4, and that more than anything makes the system feel snappy. I've already blown through the meager 4GB of RAM (why does Firefox need 2GB?) and it hardly skips a beat despite paging constantly. Design and Impression:
I think this is a very attractive laptop. The brushed aluminum is nice, and the Bronze color I have adds character without being gaudy. A lot of the corners and edges are well defined instead of rounded, and I actually prefer that. The entire inner surface is covered by a rubberized plastic, and it feels really nice to use. The fingerprint scanner actually works pretty well, and I find myself using it more and more out of convenience. There's a decent selection of ports, and I have no complaints about the layout. Build Quality:
The chassis feels really well built. It's solid, sturdy, and resists torsion well. You can pick up the laptop by one corner and it still won't flex or creak.
The same unfortunately cannot be said about the screen lid. The screen flexes by a lot, and even opening the lid will cause the screen to flex noticeably. Furthermore the hinges are looser than I would prefer. I think Dell made the hinges just loose enough so you can open the lid with one hand, but the result is that the screen will wobble a lot. Even typing can wobble the screen. Fit and finish is good but not great. There's still gaps here and there and some things don't quite line up, but those details are small and you'll unlikely notice or care unless you're really OCD about these things. Screen:
Speaking of the screen, it's your typical bottom-of-the-line 1366x768 TN panel. Poor color, poor contrast, poor viewing angles, poor resolution; McKayla is definitely not impressed. Google AUO313C if you want to see some hard numbers. It's perfectly adequate for office use or web surfacing, but I'd avoid it for multimedia work or even watching movies. Also the bezel is rather big. Keyboard and Touchpad:
The keyboard isn't bad but isn't great either. There's a fair amount of flex especially near the center. Feedback and response is decent, but typing still feels mushy or spongy. The biggest thing for me is that the keyboard feels a bit cramped. I measured keyboard and it's actually a bit shorter than the ones on my Vostro 2510 and unibody macbook 13, so the result is that I tend to overshoot bottom row keys and the spacebar. The response of the keys also becomes much worse when you hit the bottom edge. Maybe this is something I could get used to over time. Somehow Apple managed to fit a bigger keyboard and bigger trackpad into a smaller area.
On a positive note the layout I think is fantastic, especially with the navigation column on the right. For some reason I just can't get used to pgup and pgdn on the sides of the arrow keys, so this is appreciated. The touchpad is similar quality. Accuracy could be better and I found there was a fair amount of tradeoff between speed and accuracy; I never could tune it to a point where tracking was both fast enough and accurate enough. The multitouch gestures work, but they feel really clumsy compared a mac. Overall I found myself relying more on the keyboard navigation column rather than gestures. Dell should really start using Synaptics instead of this Alps crap.
There's an FN combo to disable the touchpad when you're typing, so that's a nice plus. Speakers:
I'm no audiophile, but it sounds decent to me until volume gets above about 50%. Then you start getting a lot of distortions and vibrations from the chassis.
The one thing I want to mention is that the speakers fire downwards, so having the laptop sit on a solid surface really helps. Temps and Noise:
The temps are generally between 40's to 60's. The only concern I have is the HDD runs a bit warm due to its proximity to the heatsinks. Usually it's in the low to mid 40's, but it can easily spike to the 50's. I'm not bothered at all by the fans, but they are rather aggressive. For me this is preferable to running a hot computer. I think you can change power settings so that it throttles the CPU before turning on the fans. The only curiosity about noise is that the HDD is rather loud. I have a Seagate Momentus and it makes a pretty audible whirring noise when it's on. At first I mistook it for the fan. Battery Life:
I didn't test this too much, but my estimates are 5-6 hours idle and 3-4 hours of light work or web browsing. Flash video will unsurprisingly eat through battery faster. Conclusion:
Overall I'm pretty happy with it given what I paid. The biggest disappointment is by far the screen. Not just the panel, but the build quality of the lid as well. The keyboard, touchpad, speakers, and battery life are also not that great. At this price point though there's still going to be pretty big tradeoffs between performance, quality, and features and I think these are the areas where Dell really cut corners.
My usage generally involves a "docked" experience, so that mitigates most of the negatives for me. I'm quite happy with the performance and overall build quality. So far I also haven't had any issues with the hardware (my D1704 works great). At this point I don't see any reason to return it, although I still have almost two weeks left on that decision.
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