I’ve been in the market for a new laptop computer for a while now and just never found a deal I could live with, until about two weeks ago.  I found a Slickdeal for 15% off Dell refurbs.  I know other people who have had great success with factory refurbished Dell laptops, so I figured I would give it a try.

I found an XPS M1330 refurb with some decent specs for a spectacular price.  It showed up on my doorstep on Monday with a busted screen though.  I’m not sure whether the screen was defective or busted up during shipping (the box had a decent dent on one side).  The LCD wasn’t actually cracked, but there was some crazy pixelation and flickering.

Preparing myself to ship it back, I contacted Dell and they troubleshot the laptop over the phone, having me connect an external monitor to the VGA-out plug to make sure it wasn’t the motherboard or video card.  Then, to my surpise, they told me they’d send a technition out to my house with parts to correct the problem.  This was about 6:00PM on a Monday, and at 8:30AM on Tuesday, I got a call saying they had the new screen and would like to install it that day.  Nuts.

I’m very pleased with the laptop overall, and the new screen is extremely bright and very sharp.  It’s actually so bright that it’s easier on the eyes if you turn down the brightness a few notches.  The extended life 9-cell battery is also nice, with battery life somewhere in the neighborhood of 6-7 hours.

On a side note, the XPS M1330 came with FOUR PRIMARY PARTITIONS, the maximum number allowable on a single physical disk.

1. EISA Tools (Primary) This might only be present on refurbs to check the hardware at the factory, but I’m not sure.
2. Recovery Partition (Primary)
3. OS Partition (Primary)
4. Media Direct Partition (Primary)

This means you have to blow one away before you can make any other partitions.  So that dedicated data partition to protect yourself from Vista crashes will take some fanagling.  I’d vote the recovery partition off the island first.  I’m pretty sure I’d reinstall from scratch before I tried to “recover” the factory installation and included standard bloatware.