Would a Dell Inspiron XPS M170 be worth getting now?

I have a 3 year old Acer 7104. It has a 17" screen which is brilliant, but a really sucky integrated graphics card. Im a gamer at heart, but dont want anything extreme, like the new gaming laptops for £1500.

I was looking at just a new laptop for about £700, but came across this Dell. Its quite old, but it will still play the games I want it to. Right now my laptop stuggles so much with big battles on Rome total war and wont even run battlefield 2.

I did a forum search and have read some bad things about the reliability of the gfx card. Also, it would be a refurbished one I'm looking at of an auction site.

Any opinions welcome.

I had a Dell XPS M170 from August 2005, with the 2.13ghz Pentium M and GeForce 6800 Ultra. It was a brilliant machine, quick and capable of handling any application, with an awesome screen, perfect for gaming or DVD playback. I upgraded the graphics to a 7800GTX six months after purchase to keep pace with games, and it was fine until I started to see the limitations of the processing power of the machine and how limited the upgrade path was.

I sold it to a mate nearly two years ago, and I'm glad I did. The graphics card died around Easter last year, and he had to spend £200 on a replacement. It's now working fine, but it's a lot to spend on dated technology.

Personally I'd never buy a gaming laptop again - they're overpriced and impractical. Whilst an XPS would be an upgrade from what you've got, they're big and heavy and as I've already mentioned, prone to failures. That said, it will run BF2 (first game I ever played on the machine.)

Do you have to have a laptop? A desktop for the same price would obviously offer more power and more upgradeability for the same price. The value of the XPS really depends on how much it is to be honest. I wouldn't pay more than £400 for one now.

Thanks for your reply, its sad to hear about more failures. Yes it has to be a laptop, Im studying abroad and working abroad elswehere in the summer so a desktop would be too impractical. How I miss my desktop at home...

It would be about £500 including delivery for a refurbished one but I would be tempted by a warranty also. Im not too bothered about upgradeability due to access to a 360 for the latest games. If it runs battlefield 2 OK then it will be ok for my other games, as all my favourite games are 2006 or before.

My laptop knowledge is non existent, 3 years ago I just wanted a big screen and assumed it would be ok with games, but then the xbox 360 took me away from it but now its come back to haunt me.

Im open to other recommendations as well.

The M170 is really old so your going to have slow components like cpu ram gpu etc, as i said in the previois thread your best of looking at the Dell XPS M1530 as they will be really cheap, it has an Nvidia 8600M GT which is definatly powerfull enough to run BF2 as i play Bioshock/COD4 on mine.

If you wanted to keep with the big screen, take a look at the Dell Studio 17 again the Radeon 3650 should be able to handle BF2 easily, this is probably yout best bet as it comes in just over budget at £550 but if you look at the specs compared with the base model youll see that it has a reasoanble cpu and dedicated GPU rather than onboard :

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/p...px/laptop_studio_17?c=uk&cs=ukdhs1&l=en&s=dhs

The big screen bothered me when I was first getting one, but the 15.4" would be ok, especially if it was such a powerful laptop.

Would you recommend a refurbed m1530 for about £500 or do you thinkI could buy new for that price?

Oh another reason for the m170 would be because of windows XP, im not too excited about vista and would prefer xp if possible.

slambo69 said:

The big screen bothered me when I was first getting one, but the 15.4" would be ok, especially if it was such a powerful laptop.

Would you recommend a refurbed m1530 for about £500 or do you thinkI could buy new for that price?

Oh another reason for the m170 would be because of windows XP, im not too excited about vista and would prefer xp if possible.

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Try the Dell Outlet, they may have some cheap M1530s with the 8600m GT available.

slambo69 said:

The big screen bothered me when I was first getting one, but the 15.4" would be ok, especially if it was such a powerful laptop.

Would you recommend a refurbed m1530 for about £500 or do you thinkI could buy new for that price?

Oh another reason for the m170 would be because of windows XP, im not too excited about vista and would prefer xp if possible.

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As said take a look in the dell outlet if you want xp your gonna have to buy a new xps or install it yourself, vista is fine just takes some getting used to.

I had a quick browse, but the prices are almost the same as new, or at least not more than 10%. Its still about £650, factoring in delivery it could be a bit much for me.

It looks like a really good laptop, but Im still considering the m170 refurb with something like a 3 year warranty. The games I want to play are the old Call of duty's, battlefield 2 and the ones before and I love rainbow six ravenshield.

I know they are all really old, but its annoying that I cant even play them on my laptop.

The one that originally caught my eye (m170) has 2.13 GHz, nvidia geforce 7800 256mb and 2GB of ram(which I might upgrade). Adding it up, this would cost about £650 for the laptop, 3 years warranty and delivery to the czech republic.

I shall investigate the 1530 more though.

Thank you all for yout info so far, I'd be lost without it!

If i were you i would sign up here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/

nobody knows more about notebooks than these guys, theres a section ig you dont really know what your looking for.

You'd be better off buying a used Inspiron 9400 with a 7800/7900 in it, you'd get it cheaper as it isn't labelled XPS so doesn't attract the 1337 extra price tag... It's pretty much the same chassis though.