The Dell XPS M140 is the entry level model in Dell’s line of XPS notebook PC’s. It offers good mainstream performance, excellent battery life, but despite its XPS branding, it is completely comparable to Dell's Inspiron laptop models. What the XPS branding does get you is improved support from Dell, full versions of internet security software, and excellent battery life. The M140 is available with several options, though fewer than Dell’s other laptops. Other than the anemic Intel graphics processor, the base model M140 makes no compromises, its a powerful notebook at a nice price ($900 at the time of my purchase). Its also the same laptop as the 630M sold from Dell’s business website, less the Media Center operating system. Key specs for the model I purchased are

Intel Pentium M 750 CPU (1.86GHz/2MB cache),
14” widescreen display, WXGA
512mb ram
8x DVD+/-RW dual layer writer/24X CDRW
80 gb hard drive
53 whr 6 cell Li-ion battery
Intel Pro 2200 wifi b/g adapter
Integrated Intel graphics Media accelerator 900 (no other option is available)
Windows Media Center Operating system (no internal TV tuner included, though external tuners are an option)
“Instant On” option for media playback (Dell MediaDirect)

There are lots of I/O ports, especially for a laptop this size
4-USB 2.0 ports
5-in-1 removable memory card reader - Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, Secure Digital(SD), Multi-Media Card (MMC) and xD Picture Card
Line-out (external speakers/headphone) and microphone jack
15-pin vga connector
One IEEE 1394 firewire port
S-Video connector
10/100 Ethernet connector
Modem connector
Express card slot
A bluetooth option is also available

My son has been using a 17" Inspiron 9200 widescreen laptop in college, but it was just too big to carry around and its size also made it unusable on the classroom desks. After some discussion, we rejected the popular 15" Inspiron 6000 notebooks, and we decided a 14" model would be a better fit, and eventually decided on this model from Dell, given our success with previous purchases. This laptop is being used for taking notes, writing reports, preparing presentations, web browsing, instant messaging, and watching movies.

In the Box and Setup

"In the box" (an eye-catching glossy black box) you'll find the XPS M140, a powerblock, large single page quickstart guide, application cd’s, XPS cd binder (fairly nice, glossy black with silver XPS lettering), a 8” x 12” black drawstring bag, and a warranty/safety manual, . Neither a hard copy manual nor windows cd were included included. If you need to reinstall windows, you'll need to do it from a hidden partition on the hard drive. The only cables included were the power cables. Two software programs come standard with the XPS M140, Wordperfect, and McAfee Security Center. A 15 month subscription to McAfee Security Center is included, and you can upgrade to 24 months for $10 (an offer made when you first register your software).

Setup was easy, plug it in and turn it, and follow through the short windows setup wizard and registration. You’ll also need to register the McAfee AV software to get updates. The wireless card recognized the wireless network in my home (and other locations on campus) immediately and easily. Once I entered my wireless security key. I was able to access the interet and other computers on my home network, and my son has used this laptop on campus and elsewhere to connect to wireless networks without problems.

Appearances and Controls

The M140 is 1.5 inches thick, 13 inches wide, and 9.6 inches deep, about average for a 14" laptop. The weight is about 5 1/2 lbs with the standard battery. The laptop is silver with glossy white trim, looking very much like Dell’s Inspiron series of laptops.

The controls are conveniently and intuitively located. The keyboard is a typical laptop keyboard, conventional size, with keys located a little too tightly for my taste. Trackpad usability continues to improve with each laptop generation, and this one is pretty easy to use, and intuitive. The touchpad not only moves the cursor, but scrolls easily, just hold your finger down on the right edge of the pad, then slide up and down to scroll up and down a document or web pages. You can also “drag and drop” by tapping once on a item, to grab it, and then you can move it across the screen with your mouse pointer. Tap again to release the item.

A row of 8 multimedia keys are situated on the front edge of the bottom half of the laptop. The first three mute, raise and lower volume. These are followed by Play/pause, Next track, previous track and stop buttons. The final button is the Media Direct button, which allows you to quickly play music or video without launching windows.. These buttons are backlit in with “dell blue” lighting. Each time you touch a button, all the buttons light up for a few seconds.

Almost all of the ports are conveniently located on the left or right side of the laptop for easy access. On the left are is the 5 in 1 card reader, firewire port, express card slot, s video port and headphone and microphone jacks.. On the right is the dvd/cd drive, 2 usb ports, modem and Ethernet ports, and are the audio jacks, firewire port, sd card slot, PC card slot, and access to the hard drive bay. Only two usb ports and the power connector are on the back of the laptop.

Access panels for one of the two memory slots, hard drive, modem, and wireless card are all located on the bottom of the laptop, and can be opened by removing two screws. A second memory slot is located under the keyboard and is not user accessible.

When running, the laptop is noticeably warm on the bottom, and warm air is exhausted from vents on the left side of the laptop. So far, heat hasn't been a problem with this laptop.

Using the XPS M140

Playing Music and DVD’s

The M140’s display and sound system aren’t state of the art, but they’re pretty good for a $900 laptop, especially one that provides mainstream performance like this one provides. And as is typical of most Microsoft products, Media Center has evolved into a terrific all around internet powered media player, which means this laptop is a very capable multimedia PC, at least in the world of 14” laptops. The standard battery provides enough power to watch a DVD, even one of the 3 plus hour Lord of the Rings DVD’s.

If you just want to watch video’s or listen to music, the Dell Media Direct button on the front of the laptop provides a way to startup your PC, launching Dell Media Direct application in about 10-15 seconds, bypassing most of the long Windows startup routine. Media Direct can then be used for playing music and video’s and viewing images. Media Direct appears to be a rebranded version of CyberLink’s PowerCinema software package, an application which is almost indistinguishable from Windows Media Center, and is a solid media player software package. There is one drawback, when you boot up using Media Direct without fully booting Windows, you can’t play any files with DRM licensing, tunes purchased from Napster, for example.

Battery Life

The included 53whr battery is rated by Dell for 4.3 hours of routine usage (based on Bapco MobmileMark 2005 Battery Benchmark tests run in Dell labs) . Normal usage, with stops and starts and different applications varies a lot from user to user, but my experience indicates Dell's estimate is only slightly on the high side, assuming you're running routine office applications. In a more “repeatable” test, I charged the battery fully and set the laptop to play a DVD (Firefly- Serenity) with the volume at ~80%, loud enough to hear over some background noise from other rooms in my home. I also set the screen at half brightness, about as low as you would want to go in indoor lighting. Under these conditions, battery life was 3 hours in 20 minutes, enough to watch the movie, the extras, and then some, pretty good for the smallest battery offered with this laptop. I’d expect the optional 80 whr battery to provide about 5 hours of DVD watching, and ~6 hours worth of running office applications.

Recharging is quick, I can recharge the battery from 0% to a full charge in under 2 hours. The powerblock/cables are convenientlyl designed. The powerblock itself is about 1” thich, 2” wide, and 6” long, and slightly concave on each end. Two cords are attached to the power block, a 3” cord which runs to the wall receptacle, and a 5’ cord which runs to the laptop. When not in use, the cords can be looped around the concave ends of the powerblock, and held in place with an elastic strap permanently attached to the powerblock. The battery is easy to change, a springloaded locking mechanism holds it in place along the back bottom edge of the laptop.

Performance

Graphics in the M140 are powered by a Intel Media Accelerator 900 using up to 128mb of shared memory. This is about as "low end" as you can go. The M140 is not really 3d gaming capable, you could probably play games from 3 years ago with the details set on low, but that’s about it. Less graphic intensive games, strategy games from a year ago, for example, will work ok. But as long as your applications don’t require much 3d acceleration, the M740 will get the job done quickly.

To prove my point, I ran the Aquamark 3 gaming benchmark on this laptop, and compared those scores to the same benchmark date taken on a Inspiron 9200 laptop with very good 3d graphics, an ATI 9700 chip and slightly slower 1.8ghz Pentium M745 cpu. As can be seen below, the CPU scores are comparable, but the graphics scores for this laptop are terrible, providing an average framerate of only 6.4 frames per second vs 26.7 for the Inspiron 9200.

Aquamark3 XPS M140 Scores
Overall 6400
GFX 663
CPU 9401
Ave FPS 6.4

Aquamark3 Inspiron 9200 with ATI 9700 Pro graphics chip
Overall 26689
CPU 8888
GFX 3138
Ave FPS: 26.7
(This compares to an average Aquamark3 FPS of 37.23 for my 2.66ghz desktop/ATI 9800 Pro.)

I also ran Sisoft Sandra’s Multimedia instructions and Arithmetic benchmarks on this laptop, and received the following scores..

Sisoft Arithmetic Benchmark scores XPS M740:
Drystone 7878
Whetstone 3277
Sisoft Multimedia Instructions Benchmark scores:
17391 integer
19348 floating point

To put these scores in context, I compared them to desktop benchmark scores in the Sisoft database. These numbers were very close to benchmarks achieved by desktops with 3ghz Pentium IV or Athlon XP 2600+ cpu's, very capable scores for a laptop, but not overwhelmingly fast.

For comparison, the scores achieved by my 1 year old Inspiron 9200 laptop with the slightly slower Pentium M745 cpu and ATI 9700 pro graphics chip are listed below. There is almost no difference in performance in these benchmarks between the two laptops, again indicating that this laptop should handle all your tasks which do not require 3d acceleration.

Sisoft Arithmetic Benchmark scores Inspiron 9200:
Arithmetic CPU
Dhrystone alu 7732mips
Whetstone fpu 2495
Multimedia instructions
17099 integer it/s
18832 it/s floating point

Display

The M140 comes with a 1280 X 800 resolution 14.1-inch widescreen TFT display. I’ve read reports that indicate Dell uses more than one supplier for their LCD displays, so my experiences may not apply to every M140. (Also note that Dell offers two LCD display options for the M140, both 1280 X 800 resolution, but the $30 more expensive True Life version offers higher contrast, an option I regrettably did not request.)

There were no dead pixels on the laptop we received. Colors very uniform across the screen, and there appears to be no distortion at the corners. Moire or pincushion effects were not a problem. Viewing angles are good, but not great. Left and right viewing angles appear to about 40 degrees before the loss of contrast becomes noticeable. Acceptable viewing angles from above and below vertical are worse, about 20 degrees. Looking from above, the display washes out (becomes lighter), while views from below become darker.

I find the contrast on this display somewhat lacking. When watch movies with dark scenes, I can't see as much detail in dark areas. This screen on the M140 is pretty good, but its not the best you can find, which makes me wish I had spent the extra $30 for the True Life display.

Pixel response time (the time required for a pixel to go from off to on and back to off) is about 25ms, by my estimate, not Dell’s, with the fall time (on to off time) being greater than the rise time (off to on), comparable with other laptop displays I've used. This means the tendency for fast moving images to leave tails or streaks as they move across the screen is minimal, but not zero, and some users might notice streaking. 25ms is a rough estimate I made using a bench mark program called “Pixel Persistence Analyzer”. This benchmark program allows you to vary the speed at which two colored blocks, separated by a known distance, move across the screen. As you increase the speed, the tailing effect caused by the transition in pixel colors cause the blurring tail of the leading block to touch the tailing block. By adjusting the speeds until the blocks trailing and leading edges appear to touch, you can estimate the pixel response time. I find 25ms easily fast enough for watching DVD’s and most all other applications this laptop is capable of running. Pixel response time wouldn’t be quite fast enough to satisfy serious gamers, but the lack of a dedicated 3d graphics chip in this laptop will mean gamers won’t be using it much anyway.

Storage

Our laptop came with a 5400 rpm 80gb harddrive ( 7200 rpm drives of various sizes were also available at higher prices). The drive installed was a 2.5" Hitachi HTS541080G9AT00 5400 rpm drive with an 8mb buffer and an average seek time of 12 seconds. The drive also seems run very quiet, and is reputed to be power efficient. Sisoft Sandra’s FileSystem Benchmark for this drive was 30mb/sec, pretty good for a 5400 rpm laptop drive. HD tach reported an average read speed of 29mb/sec and a burst speed of 89 mb/sec. Good enough that it won’t be a noticeable holdup for most users.

The 24X CDRW/8X DVD plus/minus R/RW combo drive installed in our laptop was a NEC ND-6650 DVD dual layer DVD writer. It supports packet writing (drag and drop burning), but does not support Mt. Rainier packet writing and the fast formatting it allows. Performance of this drive matches its nameplate speeds, 24X cd writing and 8X dvd writing with media rated at least for those speeds. Its not incredibly fast, but burning a cd takes less than a couple of minutes longer than it would take to burn a cd on a 52X cd writer on your desktop.

The 5 in one card reader is a feature I didn't even notice when I orded this laptop, but its one I appreciate, since I have other devices that use SD, XD, and memory stick flash cards, all supported by this card reader. It does lack a reader for compactflash cards.

Support

The warranty included in the base price is for 1 year. Dell claims XPS customers receive 24/7 premium service from highly trained XPS experts. No matter what your XPS needs, we’re here to help – all day, every day.owners of XPS systems will receive Longer terms are available. Another plus offered with XPS laptops is the 15 month McAfee Security subscription supplied with the laptop, the full version of McAfee security center, not just a 90 day trial. I’ve not tried Dell XPS support yet, and hope I don’t need too, but it does sound like Dell is trying to offer a bit more to XPS customers.

Dell support has worked well for me in the past. When a Dell monitor I owned started to fail, it was replaced quickly, and Dell paid to ship the old one back). When Dell lowered the price of this laptop by $46 a few days after I ordered, I called, and Dell offered my a $50 gift certificate, which I accepted. The user forums on the Dell site are very active, and are an excellent source of information. Dell also offers downloads on their website. I’ve always been able to get the support I’ve needed from Dell, although I’ll admit I end up spending more time on the phone than I’d like to getting it.



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 900
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 14 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50