Dell XPS - THE laptop for a student
Fantastic, fun and functional!

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The Dell XPS laptops are the company's top-of-the-line range - and rightly so.  They come in two varieties : the M1710 is a gamer's delight, with a 17 inch screen, beautiful graphics from a NVIDIA^® GeForce^TM  Go 7950 GTX graphics card, and 2.33 Ghz hard drive.  The M1210, which I have, is a perfect student's laptop.  First, it is the smallest laptop that Dell makes, weighing under 2 kg with a 12 inch screen, and has shock protectors - perfect for carrying to those lectures that take a twenty-minute walk to get to!  Secondly, it has a built-in webcam, so when you miss your family and friends while you're away at school, all you need to do is log on to see them.  Third, it has special features like the hard-drive partition, and independent multimedia buttons that can be used without switching on the computer - this saves battery for watching movies on long journeys.  It also helps that both of of the XPS's look amazing - very sleek, chic, and ooh-ahh-inducing.  Most of all, it is a computer that won't let you down.

Computer problems used to give me so much grief - from unstable systems to broken hardware, to computers that simply made my work disappear into whirring mechanical oblivion the night before a big project was due, I had experienced it all.  Definitely not good. 

So you can imagine, when I finally came to buy my new laptop, how much care I put into choosing it.  Away at university with deadlines coming up every day, armed with MSN and my webcam as chief sources of communication with family and friends back home, I certainly didn't want to face the agony of not having my computer for a week while it was in repair.  I'm happy to say, my Dell has not "acted up" once for the 6 months that I've had it.  Its reliability is enhanced by the fact that you can choose to subscribe to McAfee anti-virus when you buy it - a handy addition that will save you money, as their rates are somewhat cheaper than if you bought the software by itself.

What about that scandal where the Dell computer blew up, you say?  I know, I know - that was one of my main reservations before buying one too.  However, it turns out that these faulty batteries that exploded were provided by Sony, and have since been recalled.  So buy Dell with confidence!

Besides reliability, I also really liked the fact that you could customise to your heart's content on Dell's website before ordering.  You can choose anything, from a 100 GB hard-drive, to state-of-the-art graphics cards, and adjust the features of the computer according to your needs.  I believe this is one of the biggest advantages in buying a Dell.  Normally if you buy a really good computer, it will have excellent features for every aspect - but what if you don't necessarily need all those aspects?  You'd be wasting your money!  For example, I might need a big hard-drive to store all my files, but as I'm not a big computer game player, I might not need a premium graphics card.  Being able to adjust the features saves you money where you don't need it and allows you to splurge where you want to. 

Dell also happens to be one of the cheapest brands of computers with a good reputation, among the ones that I looked at, including Sony VAIO, Fujitsu, Toshiba, IBM, and Compaq.  Computers I looked at were either the same price, but with less features, or more expensive for essentially the same product.  Even some unheard of brands were more expensive than Dell.  Dell is able to offer such attractive prices due to the fact that it does not display its products in stores.  This might put off some people, but the Dell website and the sales-staff are truly stellar.  I didn't feel as though I knew less about my Dell computer when shopping for it because I hadn't seen it in a store.  The salesperson I ordered it from very knowledgeable, knowing all the details about the product, reminding me which features I might need to add when ordering online, following up the on the process the next day to see if I had been alright submitting my order...all with a friendly and non-pressuring attitude. 

So in short, buy XPS if you want a good, reliable laptop with all the fancy features you could dream of - without spending a fortune!