So my Dell Inspiron 1520, which I had ordered on 08, Jan, finally reached me 22, Jan. (Read about the Ordering here). A full week earlier than the estimated delivery time of 29, Jan, given by Dell, which is very good, but the the cynic in me was wondering whether Dell gives itself too much time to deliver the stuff.

Anyway since I am in Kerala, I had to make a lot of effort to get the machine delivered to me. First I found out an acquaintance of a friend in Coimbatore, and had the parcel delivered there. A person then travelled from Coimbatore to Pallakkad to deliver it to my friend,  who then shipped it to Kottayam in local transportation.

All this rigmaroll because Dell will not deliver in Kerala without a certificate of ownership (Form 16) from Kerala Sales Tax. The sales tax department will not release the  certificate unless you have a valid invoice, which Dell will send only with the Merchandise once you send them the certificate in advance. So we end up in a Chicken and Egg situation, which is very difficult ot get over unless you have freinds/ relatives in Tamilnadu, Karnataka or in Kerala Sales Tax.

That is a lot of effort for a Dell, which I am saying in retrospect after getting the machine.

The machine reached me in one large box, which could easily have carried a desktop late on 22.01.2008. I was eager to open the unit and take a look at the result of my marathon effort. I fended off the day’s hardword crying through my bones and pulling on my eyelids, to cut open the parcel.

Things are very well packed with accessories coming in a seperate compartmented box. The nylon bag which come free with 1520 is well built, but looks cheap, compared to the imitation leather bags that come with HP or Compaq.

The notebook itself is packed in a Thermocol box. I had ordered a nice midight blue colour for my laptop. The unit looks nice from ouside with lovely well finished matt blue color on the screen lid. There is a plasti-chrome latch to open the screen lid, which I thought looked a bit tacky and felt similar with a lot of play. The latch also does not hold the screen snugly with the body of the machine and there is a some 2 to 3 mm up and down movement of the screen lid even with latch closed. Compare this to smilar HP which does not have a latch and screen closes with a help of pressure from a spring loaded cam as you fold the lid and fits quite snugly.

Once the screen is open you are greeted by a swathe of pure brushed aluminium finish (or silver if you prefer). Palm rests are aluminium, keypad and touchpad are also aluminium. The screen is bordered by a thick aluminium finished plastic, the top of which holds the 2 MP webcam and microphone array.

So much aluminium might look good to some people, but I thought that it looks a bit cheap. The Windows and Intel stickers are also very small and unattractive and in my case a bit skewed and do not any value to the looks of the notebook. The palm rests though feels solid with little depression due to pressure. The screen also is tightly fitted with no sideways or untoward movement.

The keypad is nice with uniform key travels  and no sideways play. The touch pad is also quite good with decent screen coverage and dedicated scroll areas. The media buttons located on the front edge are again made up of cheap plastic, with each having a slightly different finish.

My unit came with a 9 cell battery, which I tested, lasted for around 3 hours 45 minutes while playing movies, which I think is good for a couple of hollywood flicks. With this battery the unit weighs a good 2.5 Kgs, which does not make it very portable. The battery itself is very snugly fitted, unlike some Vaio and Lenovo models where the battery moves quite a bit in its housing.

The performance is blistering with booting time almost same as my desktop. The screen is OK with good resolution and around 30 degrees visbililty angle horizontally. Vertically though visibilty angles are very poor with constant adjustment of the screen required with your posture to get the perfect picture.

The speakers are good though lacking in Bass and start losing fidelity at slightly high volumes, this though can be compensated by using excellent set of Creative ear-plugs supplied with the unit.

There are lot of proprietory Dell softwares come with the PC such as Dell Support, which essentially records your sytem configuration and changes to both hardware and software and alerts Dell everytime you log onto the net. This helps Dell have a fair idea of your system whenever you seek support. The Dell media centre is also good and comes with a remote and can be started without booting the computer, so that you can play media without booting the machine.

Dell also supplies you with all the CD’s of the softwares installed on the unit including the Windows XP (in my case), which I think is the first in the market.

Overall first Impression 

The unit as a whole feels well built with very little fan noise and limited heat generation. Looks though are not very sophisticated but not bad also with nice well painted screen lid. HP and Compaqs though with their Cool Blacks, Greys and sophisticated contrasts and Sony with beautifull finish look much better. But this beast offers the best configuration possible for the money paid. HP will take at least another year before they will offer similar configuration in similar price.

Read my other post on ordering a Dell here

I was on a lookout for a new notebook. After extensive search and excel tabulations vis-à-vis price and configuration I finally zeroed in on a Dell Inspiron 1520.

Why Dell??

Well Dell came out with flying colours when compared for configuration against price.

My budget was around Rs. 55000.00 and I seriously looked at Sony Vaio, HP, Compaq and Lenovo. Acer and others also were in my horizon at the beginning but the exact configuration that I wanted was not available in my budget.

Sony looked good but had lower HDD capacity and only 1 GB RAM. Also both RAM slots are occupied by two 512 MB cards, so if you have to upgrade then you have to discard at least one card, which is a waste.

HP was seriously competing with Dell, but was coming with only 6 cell battery and a spare battery was costing +4000 Rs. HP was offering a Vista home basic, which anyway I wanted to remove and upload XP. The build quality also looked circumspect because the shell underneath the keyboard was bending when I tried a bit of pressure on the keys. Also 2 GHz processor was not available. The 1.8 GHz model with rest of the things same as Dell was Rs. 62000.00.

You can watch an interesting video here.

Lenovo in the desired config was also too costly and came with 6 cell battery with no option of an upgrade and again had Vista home basic.

So after lot of thought and web search I decided to look at Dell. Now Dell in India like everywhere else operates on a direct marketing model, which means that there are no dealers and resellers. You have to go to the Dell website or contact them over a toll free number.

One major advantage of Dell, which is not available in any major brand is that you can configure your own PC, unlike others, where it comes fully bundled and you have to take some of what you don’t like with some of what you do.

It does not mean that you can configure everything. Some features especially the bundled operating system is thrust upon you. Like Inspiron 1420 does not come with XP, you have to necessarily take Vista. Also you cannot buy a naked PC without any software. You cannot touch and feel the PC and have first hand experience of the features.

Also once the delivery comes, you will have to setup the PC yourself as there are no Dell employees or franchisees to do it. This can be slightly difficult if you are technologically challenged. But you have help in form of a toll free technical assistance which will guide you through the process step by step. Let me see how effective they are once I get my delivery.

If you want to take delivery in Kerala, then things are a bit more difficult as you have send dell what is called Form 16 of the Keraka General Sales Tax, which is slightly difficult to procure, but you can try your luck at the nearest sales tax office. Better option is to take delivery in Tamilnadu or Karnataka and have somebody deliver it here.

All these disadvantages are small when you start configuring. The price at the bottom of the screen automatically updates as per your choice. The final price which comes will knock your head off.

You may have to shell out anything from Rs. 5000 to 10000 more if you buy any other brand with similar configuration.

Once the configuration is done you can submit the same and a Dell sales executive will call you to confirm the order and take payment options.

The surprise does not end here as I pleasantly discovered. My PC with desired configuration came to Rs. 56900.00.  Dell executives are very aggressive when it comes to closing a deal and there is fierce competition among them. After firming up the order I called up Dell to confirm something and my call was transferred to some other executive who had not dealt with me earlier. He immediately latched on to me and wanted to close the deal immediately. I told him that my budget was only 55000. He promptly obliged and reduced the price to 55000.00. After some time I called again to speak to my executive to finalise the order, I got transferred to somebody else, who promptly offered me the same PC for 53000.00. I thought, let me play the game further and tried to get some more discount through other executives, but it seems this was the lowest anybody will go. So I finally closed the deal at Rs.53000.00, which is a complete steal over all the PCs and configurations that I have seen.

I have finally ordered the following configuration

1. Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 at 2.0 Ghz
2. 2 GB RAM
3. 160 GB HDD
4. Windows XP Professional
5. 9 cell battery
6. Nvidia 8400 graphics card
7. 2 years extended warranty and damage cover

 Other bells and whistles such as 2mp camera, 15.4 in screen,  remote, stereo sound, ear plugs, USB ports, DVD R/W, bag etc are part of the system. 

The Dell executives were very friendly and ready to offer discounts. The delivery time is 21 days, which is a bit long, but tolerable considering the discounts that I just received and that the machine is made in Malaysia and shipped here.

1420 model is being produced in Chennai, so that should have lesser waiting time

Now that ordering part is over I am looking forward to the delivery and using my PC. I’ll of course write my experiences for all to benefit.

(Read about the Delivery Here)