This unit comes in a variety of shiny “skins” – from bright red (like our test model) to black, Dell offers a few choices for those who are looking to make a statement wherever they take this PC. Playing in concert with that color scheme is a series of onboard lights in various places of the laptop and are configurable in the system BIOS to turn different colors. While these types of features are there for nothing but bragging rights, they do speak volumes as to what lies under the hood of this PC powerhouse.

Dell offers varying choices of Microsoft’s Windows Vista, from Home to Ultimate – ours came with the latter. Why they offer Vista on a laptop which has a DX9-class GPU is beyond me as the 3D performance under Vista is still not as good as it is on XP. While Vista Ultimate clearly has Media Center integration it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense at this time to recommend going the Vista route unless your primary drive for this unit is that integration.

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