Dell XPS 15 L502x 15.6" Silver Notebook

I bought mine direct from Dell (preferred customer) to replace my tired

Studio 1550.

i7, 2.2ghz, 1tb drive, 8 gig ram, GT525 & intel HD graphics, JBL sound,

bluetooth etc.

1st thing I do is set it up, and then pull the HDD out, pop in a clean one,

and set it up my way, and leave the "factory" drive on the shelf with the

expiration date of the warranty. If I have a warranty claim, pop in THEIR

drive with no personal data on it and send it back.

I didn't get the back-lit keyboard.

This thing screams on photoshop, which I use daily. Keyboard is responsive,

and easier than several of my older laptops. Keys are solid, not spongy.

The dual video is nice on the battery also. I went with the bigger battery

& charger. The bigger battery has the advantage of tilting the entire laptop

up. The sound on this thing is something to make you wonder how they get that

sort of sound out of a laptop. The JBL logo on the bottom, I guess the entire

cavity of the laptop is a tuned port. When it is sitting on a table, you can

really hear the bass pumping through. The case speakers on the top side are

clear & pretty loud. 3 USB ports. One on the left, one in back, and a combo

e-sata/usb on the right. USB 3 is plenty fast for my needs. I use a BT

mouse, and it works without any issue.

Battery life for my use is excellent. I can have it charged, unplug it after

work at 5pm, put it in sleep mode, and leave it that way til the next day, and

it might use 1-3% of the battery, making startup faster.

Wireless works perfectly, no issues.

My specs: Dell XPS l502x (Purchased May 2011)

Processor: i5 2410M

RAM: 6GB

HDD: 640 gb 7200 hard drive

Resolution: 1366 x 768

Video card: GeForce 540M 2GB

First off: the audio on this model is truly incredible for the price range. The JBL speakers with subwoofer make it unnecessary to have to plug your laptop in to external speakers for almost any situation (except of course... parties and what have you). In fact, you'd truly be hard pressed to find better audio quality in a laptop even now. The new Lenovo y410 and y510 models do come with JBL speakers, however they are not of the same quality.

The keyboard is comfortable for my usage, since I have fairly large hands. I have heard that some people complain about the spacing between keys, but honestly... unless you have tiny fingers I don't really understand how it's an issue.

The screen quality is pretty good for the price and resolution.

Now for the bad.. well, horrible.

The battery quality is horribly sub par; the 9cell battery I purchased with the unit barely kept about one hour charge after a year and at current lasts about 35-40 minutes with wireless enabled. Considering that the laptop is plugged in almost 85% of the time, this is fairly terrible.

And most importantly (or annoyingly), the video card. The Nvidia GeForce 540M comes with either 1GB or 2GB of dedicated video memory. I opted for the 2GB over the 1GB merely because it was only about a $20 upgrade at the time of purchase. The card has pretty solid reviews on notebookcheck in terms of performance and can play modern games at decent quality. However (and this is a HUGE however), the thing crashes. It crashes a whole ton. Like a ridiculously ludicrous amount. And by crash, I do mean that the entire computer freezes along with a looping stuttering audio sound (which is incredibly loud and annoying) and must be powered down via the button.

There are several theories as to why the video card crashes (be it overheating, which obviously can occur in laptops, or more commonly, with this video card, that there is an issue with the clock speed). While it is possible to lower the amount of crashes by a great deal by switching to the integrated graphics card, I eventually found that this card would freeze during certain games, such as Starcraft 2. You can also go the "underclock the core speed of your 540M main card" which will also lower the frequency of crashes, but they still do inevitably occur under medium to heavy load. This could be an issue with the motherboard, 540M speed, etc. and that would be fine if Dell acknowledged the issue and voluntarily replaced or provided solutions to fix the crashing errors. But they haven't. In fact, they have gone a highly petty route by forcing users to extend warranties and continually replace the motherboard and video card. Oh, I said petty because on their forums, they also mute people and delete comments on their forums who even whisper anything overly negative about the computer or Dell's possible knowledge that they shipped out faulty components with the laptops and did not voluntarily pull the laptops back to replace said faulty components (if you read dell community forum posts in regards to how frequently and readily dell replaced motherboards for this laptop, it becomes fairly obvious they know of the issue).

Yes, it would cost them money to replace everyone's faulty components. But this is a premium laptop and by my standards, shipping out a laptop with faulty components is essentially shipping out an incomplete product, which Dell should be held liable for.

I am honestly stuck at a crossroads for rating this laptop. On the one hand, everything but the video card and battery runs perfectly and as it should, and the audio quality is superb. But Dell's horrible business practices in regards to informing their customers of faulty hardware (this also happened with the XPS M1530 line, see Nvidia 8 series class action lawsuit) leads me to have to ultimately give this laptop a 2/5.

Buy Dell XPS 15 L502x 15.6" Silver Notebook Now

My first XPS 15 worked for about 6 months and then everything started failing: serious connectivity issues, screen randomly turning on and off, scratchy sound, terrible picture, .... Dell customer service was horrid. They went on for about 9 months trying to convince me that there was nothing wrong with it. Eventually, when the laptop could not stay turned on for more than 5 seconds, they replaced it with another XPS. Now, 8 months later, all the problems are back and so is the horrible customer service.

Read Best Reviews of Dell XPS 15 L502x 15.6" Silver Notebook Here

I bought mine about a year and a half ago, with specs for gaming and the computer has given me nothing but problems. The moment it was out of warranty, the hard drive failed, and when I got that repaired, the battery failed. Now, once I've fixed the battery, the graphics card is giving me issues and I can't even enjoy my games any more. I've dumped over 1500$ into this trap. Never buying another Dell product again, always skimp on quality.

Want Dell XPS 15 L502x 15.6" Silver Notebook Discount?

Did the research prior to purchase. Two weeks in so far so good ,exactly as expected and very happy ? Not to much bloatware to remove but the laptop is lightening quick. The graphics good but the sound really is excellent. No issues with build quality or battery life.