Dell Adamo XPS review

Unfortunately, with a body this thin, there's not much room for a battery. In our video playback battery drain test, the Adamo XPS ran for only 1 hour and 23 minutes, a score we'd expect to see only from the biggest of desktop replacements. Considering this system had an SSD hard drive and a ULV processor, that's especially poor. In anecdotal testing, however, we got a little between 2 and 2.5 hours of general use from the slim battery pack when surfing the Web, working on office docs, etc.

Dell does include a second, larger battery with the Adamo, but that breaks up the clean lines of the system (and is more than twice as thick as the Adamo itself), and our default is to always test with the battery that fits the overall design best when there are more than one.

Dell includes an industry-standard one-year parts and labor warranty with the system. Support is accessible through a 24-7 toll-free phone line, and Dell's collection of support tools, including online chat, a Flash-based question widget, knowledge base, and driver downloads. As this is a retail-specific version of the Adamo XPS, note that retail stores offer a variety of extended warranty plans with your laptop purchase, but they're generally expensive and hard to use, so we do not recommend them.

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System configurations:

Dell Adamo XPS
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400; 4096MB DDR3 SDRAM 800MHz; 128MB (Dedicated)/1759MB (Total) Intel GS45; 128GB Samsung Solid State Drive

Sony Vaio VPCS111 FM/S
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.26GHz Intel Core i5 M430; 4096MB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 128MB (Dedicated)/1755MB (Total) Intel GMA HD; 500GB Toshiba 5,400rpm

Sony Vaio VPCF115 FM/B
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 1.6GHz Intel Core i7 720QM; 6GB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M; 500GB Samsung 5,400rpm

Asus G73jx
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 1.6GHz Intel Core i7 720QM; 6GB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870; 500GB Seagate 7,200rpm