Dell Vostro V131 13.3in Core i5 notebook Back in the old days, you knew where you were a Dell business laptop. Heave it out of the box and you’d be rewarded with a giant, hot-running thing with the aesthetic appeal of a pile-up on the M40. Dell Vostro V131 laptop Dell's Vostro V131 looks the business and with the Celeron CPU option can be bought on the cheap …
DON'T consider the Dell Vostros if you're a tech support dept looking to maintain them a lot! I did a hard disk upgrade on my Vostro 1220, and assumed it would be similar to the Latitudes (a couple of screws and the drive just slides out!) - turns out you have to virtually dismantle the whole machine (including removing the screen?!!) in order to get to the HD... :-O
I have an EliteBook where you have to pop the entire bottom off to access anything.
I also have a Vostro at the house that I'm fixing for a friend - two screws and the HDD is out... just like the Latitude (D630) I used to use.
<sarcasm>
Does this mean my EliteBook does not qualify as a business machine?
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ive yet to use one of the 13"models, but the 15"is only 300quid ex vat for a core i3 :) pretty much the best thing out there for the cash,certainly at the entry level they are the most featureful, sofar the alu clad Vostros have made very nice business machines, excluding user abuse, of 70 odd, only one has required a hardware call.
If only dell could make their rugged range as solidly!
Having worked for several years in Dells Pro Support, i got a lot of calls from customers with Vostro laptops.
They really are shit on the inside. Lowest quality components all round. It may look nice, but the quality and reliability is shockingly bad.
Just go for a Latitude instead. Spend a bit more to save a lot more!
I've got three vostros, an original 1700 which was the last of the decent build-quality units. The two latter 1720's I was disappointed in, they are a bit bendy, but that said they've survived reasonable well including umpteen trips between Scotland and Ireland for business and pleasure. I have one running Citrix XenServer and the other running Windows 7 x64 Ultimate and they're good enough (for the money). The 1920x1200 glossy screens that shipped with them are fairly pleasant to work with as well.
It's a shame they're hobbled with VGA video outputs though.
There are a lot worse things you can spent your money on when looking for cheap laptops....such as the Latitude E series. I don't think there's a single one of these in our company that hasn't topped itself.
"and a decent resolution of 1366 x 768"... I think not. You'll be scrolling your screen up and down far too much to read web pages, spreadsheets and documents.
And don't think it's only that low resolution because it's a 13" screen. All the 15" Vostros are now stuck with that screen (only the top end 17" comes with 1600x900 and that's not great for 17").
I specify and buy all the laptops for my company, being on a tight budget, we used to buy the previous Vostros in 13" and 15", they'd come with 800 line screens as standard and we'd always upgrade that to 900 lines or more. But now there's no option to improve on the measly 768 line screens (I wish they'd stop calling it "HD"), we've had to go elsewhere.
The Vostros are cheap and it does show. The slot loading DVD drive on the old nn10 range would always die and you couldn't change them. The nn20 range were better. Just a shame the step up in quality to a Latittude is quite a step up in price. That said, look after them and they'll survive ok.
I've had problems with the previous V13 - the flex causes ribbins to fail and the whole thing is trying to imitate something more expensive.
On this one the ribbon shows the shape of the sharp hard plastic of the bottom case and fails.
Both times taking the hard drive (+data) with it. I'd recommend encrypting your documents on those as sooner or later the disk is going back to Dell. Both times repaired under warranty but it's now a "stay at office" laptop as travel seems to be too much for the chassis. Anonymouse as Dell were at great pains to tell me I was the only one to see this so only they must know exactly who I am right?
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