Dell Vostro 130 Review – the svelte business laptop

The battery in the Vostro 130 is fully enclosed inside the chassis and is a 30Whr model.

We tested the machine under a few contrived situations. Firstly, we acted as a general ‘business professional' using Microsoft Office, surfing the net, sending and receiving emails, viewing several video files on youtube, and working on images within Photoshop CS5. Wireless was enabled and screen brightness was set to half, which is usable.

Under these conditions we achieved just over 2 hours which isn't as good as we hoped. Understandably, with such a flat chassis design, there are some compromises to be made. Battery life looks to be one of them.

Next, we acted as a ‘businessman on a plane'. Meaning we played 720p video files until the battery ran out, wireless was disabled and screen was set to three quarters brightness as we felt any lower ruined the overall saturation of high definition video. Headphones were connected.

Watching videos reduced the battery life by another 25 minutes, although this reduction is not as great as might be expected. What we can take from this result however is that wireless has a big hit on the battery life as it was disabled in this final test.

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