Dell XPS M140

The Dell XPS notebook line started with the XPS M170, a heavyweight gaming system, and has broadened to include a host of luxury laptops to coincide with the new high-end XPS desktops. Dell built the new XPS M140 ($1,747 direct) to be your complete digital home in a laptop's frame. It's loaded with Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and offers a customer experience unlike any other system.

The Dell M140 replaces the Inspiron 600m and is a cross between the Inspiron 6000 and the Inspiron 700m. It has the same arctic-silver design and a 5.9-pound frame. The 14.1-inch widescreen includes Dell's TrueLife vivid display, which is wonderful for watching movies and displaying photos. It's up there with the experience we had with the HP dv4000's BrightView screen. The mouse buttons also depress without noise, unlike the Dell M170's.

The M140 doesn't come with a discrete graphics engine, nor is one available as an option. The integrated Intel graphics don't have the gaming capabilities found on the M170 or even on the HP dv4000, so the system isn't ideal for a hard-core gamer. The unit is powerful, however, loaded with the fastest Pentium M (2.13 GHz) and 1GB of RAM. The battery life is also excellent; its MobileMark 2005 score reached a very high 6 hours, 28 minutes with the 80Whr battery, outlasting both the M170 and the dv4000 combined.

Dell also adds more than just an SD card slot; the included 5-in-1 card reader can read SD, MMC, XD, MS, and MS Pro. There are also four USB ports and a FireWire port onboard, as well as a dual-layer DVD±RW burner. The 80GB hard drive is fine, but a Media Center system with a TV tuner should have at least 100GB for storage. Our test system didn't come with one, but Dell's site offers Hauppauge's WinTV-PVR-USB2 Personal Video Recorder as a $134 add-on.

The M140 has a total of eight multimedia buttons sitting in the front panel, one more than the M170. The extra button is to access Dell's Media Direct, which gives you a preboot audiovisual control interface for quick and easy media access. You can also play files from a USB key or from memory cards in preboot state. The rest of the buttons are for volume controls and DVD playback buttons.