Dell Vostro V131: A Budget Business Laptop
by Jarred Walton on October 28, 2011 1:55 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- IT Computing
- Dell
- Intel
- Sandy Bridge
- Vostro
Dell Vostro V131: Not a Good LCD
I’m going to keep this section short. This is a matte LCD, yes, but that’s really about the only thing it has going for it. 1366x768, low contrast, only moderate maximum brightness, and weak colors do not make for an overall compelling experience. Here’s a look at the display performance and viewing angles.
The above certainly isn’t going to bring home any awards, but it’s worth noting that even the Latitude line has plenty of less than stellar LCDs. When we looked at the E6410 late last year, the contrast and viewing angles were only slightly better. Of course, the E6410 also had a 1440x900 panel with a maximum brightness of 300 nits, and you can order the newer E6420 with a 1600x900 premium panel, but the base model displays on the vast majority of laptops are a disappointment as far as quality goes.
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retrospooty - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
"1360x768 for a "business" laptop?! Seriously, give me a break"All low end laptops start with this, business or personal... Its extremely irritating, most people buy it not knowing, and on the business end, some IT dept's buy it cheaply not caring.
Unfortunately, its cheap, and it sells more than any other res, so they keep making them and the cycle continues.
Pirks - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
hey retro did you see this one? ==>> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/why-p...I know it's offtopic, still wanna know if you saw this :)
retrospooty - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
meh... that guy is just an Anti Android troll and has no idea what he is talking about with regards to smartphones, or IT's take on it.This is more the real deal =)
http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/26/technology/rim_pla...
Pirks - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
This doesn't touch businesses though who use bridge and because of bridge they don't care about consumer email clients or consumer Android apps. Since businesses are the primary target for RIM they couldn't care less about consumer backlash for now. And Apple controls consumers anyway so why bother.I see RIM promoting PlayBook for businesses mostly these days, they don't yet have ammo to fight Apple for consumer dollar, they just released PlayBook NDK and the 3D games like N.O.V.A. 2 and more serious apps like Skype Android port just started to appear in the App World.
Probably it's like six more months until they release next version of PlayBook OS and maybe then they could see some success in fighting against Apple. They also have an option of undercutting the Apple price since with time manufacturing costs go down.
Apple is obsessed with huge bulky 10" designs with beefy and expensive GPUs to drive high resolution screens and this drives manufacturing costs up a lot, RIM can exploit this fact with their smaller lighter 7" form factor. They already did it this month during two promotional sales weeks, I see more of that coming as manufacturing costs keep going down.
silverblue - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
We've gone for the i5-2430M model. I'm a fan of the fact that skipping from 320GB to 500GB hard drive costs a mere £10 (approx. $16 - take note, Apple). Additionally, there's no 6GB option here - we chose 8GB. Shame the SSD option is so expensive - add £180 ($290), and the RAM upgrade from 4GB to 8GB is £100 ($161) though you do end up with a dual channel machine at that point.To save going into too much detail, here's the UK version of said machine:
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.as...
We've bought it for our (interim) head so I'm sure we'll know about any problems soon enough. ;)
fokka - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
first i want to thank you for the great review! anandtech is the go-to site if you really wanna know whats inside a machine! thanks.i live in austria and got my first vostro (1310) in 2008. back then they were quite a bit thicker and built 100% out of plastic, but still delivered the best bang for the buck, imho. i only made the mistake of "upgrading" to a geforce 8400gs and while gaming on low details (gta san andreas!) was great, of course the gpu died on me, although i copper-modded it for better cooling.
thats when i first came in contact with the dell business service, which is nothing but world class support. they fixed the issue (new mainboard) and the machine is running strong since then.
in my opinion its hard to get better laptops than the vostros for that little money, which is the reason i recommend them to people who are looking for a everyday-machine and want to stay under, say, 800€.
especially the new series (3300 and newer) dont fail to impress me, since they are quite thin and feel very sturdy.
kmmatney - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
I'm using a 2007 17" Dell Inspiron with a dual core T7200 (2 Ghz, 4 MB cache) and a 1920 x 1200 true-life display and is talking about "upgrading" me to a 17" version of this. I'm a bit torn - I love my current screen, and I upgraded my current system with an SSD and maximized the RAM, and it's quite a fast system. Even though I typically run the system at 1440 x 900 resolution, I like the possibility of running at 1920 x 1200 when I need to. I really wish they still made 1920 x 1200 displays...nklak - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
My company is dell direct partner in Europe and I as manager recently choosed this little vostro for my new laptop replacing HP models after 10years. What made me do this is the size of laptop and battery life as I am always on the move and carry notebook with myself 24/7. For strict bussines use even i3 is good enough, SSD is for speed lovers, and this should be enough for 90+% of bussines users.What is bad and what was the ONE AND ONLY reason to dump this notebook is LCD. Crap resolution, shit quality (color quality, wash away effect, very bad angles etc). End of discussion, deal breaker. I spend my 10+ working hours WATCHING at this screen, for proffesionals it should be biggest issue over everything else. I have money, I can afford latitude no problems, but trust me no latitude model is match for this little fellow in usability/portability. 6420 is just to big/heavy for me (who else still need optical drive inside). This is reason apple made it right. They made it like Steve liked it, and everyone else said WOW. I personaly can not use mac, and what makes me thinking is why nobody took their aproach. When you build bussines notebook build what bussines man needs. Try not to pack everything inside, you cant please all. Home users got inspiron, power users XPS, latitude can be for professionals top speced, but be rare manufacturer who makes bussines notebooks and make Vostro a bussines laptop. Needed options, top quailty, and I am in. Right now, mr. dell, one of your partners just ordered sony for himself...Stuka87 - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
The next BDS still works pretty well. I ended up having my Precision 4500 replaced due to BSOD's that they could not track down. And lucky for me, it go replaced with a brand new M4600, which I have to say, is a great machine. I have been very happy with it.Stuka87 - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
Oh, and as for the Vostro, never been a huge fan of them. Although it looks like this one may be a step up from previous models.