A Closer Look at the Vostro V131

Outwardly, there’s a lot to like with the Vostro V131. It may not be as thin as an ultrabook or a MacBook Air, but it’s still very much a thin and light ultraportable. There’s also no optical drive to take up space, and while you can always use an external drive, most businesses (and homes) can transfer any important files from another PC over the network (or via a USB thumb drive). Here’s a gallery of the laptop, equipped with the now-standard 6-cell battery.

Outside of the Vostro name, at first glance it would be very easy to mistake the V131 for some form of Latitude. It comes in a classic Dell matte silver finish with black highlights. Open it up and you get more matte surfaces—why it’s good for businesses to have matte laptops but consumer models are so frequently adorned with glossy finishes is beyond me. Aesthetically, there’s very little I can find fault with in the V131 appearance. It looks nice and has everything most users would need. However, once you start to handle the V131 a bit the differences between Vostro and Latitude become immediately obvious.

The keyboard is an area that deserves investigation; some elements are praiseworthy, but it’s not without flaws. On the good side, you get a layout that I have grown fond of over the years—one which Dell could benefit from using on their XPS z-series in my opinion. All of the important keys are readily available, including dedicated document navigation keys on the right column, a context-sensitive key to the right of the right control key, and Fn shortcuts for various other functions. There’s also keyboard backlighting, which works just as well as on other laptops. On the not-so-good side, there’s some flex in the keyboard—particularly if you press hard (e.g. not necessarily typing, but just pressing hard on a key to see if there’s flex). It’s not enough to really detract from the typing experience, and the keyboard does make full use of the width of the chassis, but it’s definitely not anywhere near the level of the Latitude E6420 for example—it’s not even as durable as the XPS 14z, though the layout as noted is better. I can type fine on the V131 and key travel and spacing are reasonable, but it’s one of the areas where it feels like corners were cut—or at least trimmed.

Another item that you’ll find on the Latitude line which is missing here is the pointer stick and extra buttons. I know there are some people that really love the TrackPoint as a mouse alternative, but with the latest multi-touch and gesture capable touchpads I’m now firmly in the camp of touchpad users. I’ve used an E6410 quite a bit, and one item that always bothers me is the tiny touchpad surface area. It helps you avoid accidental activation while typing, but it also makes using it as a touchpad more like a netbook than a laptop. I’m not sure there’s an optimal solution that can please everyone, frankly, but I like the size of the V131 touchpad and I don’t miss the TrackPoint input or extra buttons in the least. The touchpad hardware comes from Synaptics, with a Dell-customized driver set. I didn’t experience any difficulty with accidental touchpad activation at the default settings, but if you’re experiencing such things you can set the touch sensitivity to maximum (“Heavy Touch”) and do the same for TouchCheck, at which point I had to specifically try to activate the touchpad while typing. YMMV, naturally, and I still use an actual mouse whenever I can, but the touchpad works as well as any others I can recall from recent memory.

The one area where the Vostro V131 fails to impress is in the build quality. At first it seems decent—it may not have a magnesium alloy frame, but it doesn’t feel like a complete joke. The LCD cover is composed of a magnesium alloy and feels quite solid, which at first made me think build quality was pretty close to that of the Latitude E6410. Start to massage the V131 a little more however and you’ll find that the frame and palm rest appear to be almost entirely made of plastic, and it’s not particularly thick plastic either. We mentioned keyboard flex as being present, but there’s flex throughout the chassis. Grab a corner of the laptop and lift it up and you can see a slight distortion in the shape of the casing. Grab the corners of the laptop and apply some pressure and you can also get the chassis to bend and warp quite easily. This isn’t a huge concern if you plan on handling your laptop with care (which we’d always recommend), but long-term the V131 is likely to develop more squeaks and creaks than a higher quality chassis.

One other complaint about the chassis is that the cover on the bottom that provides access to the RAM and storage can be quite difficult to remove—not difficult as in hard, but difficult as in, “Am I going to break this piece prying it off?” It has a single screw but probably six or eight plastic clips, and if you have to open it up more than a few times you’ll probably break a few clips. Opening up the slots on the bottom of a Latitude is child’s play by comparison; Latitudes are meant to be serviced quickly and returned to use, but the Vostro will take a bit more time and finesse. In short, the chassis design and materials are the major trade off in comparison to the Latitude line.

The Vostro line is targeted at smaller homes and businesses that want business class support without necessarily having to spend up for a Latitude. There’s no doubt that the build quality and materials in Dell’s Latitude line are better than the Vostro, but that doesn’t make the Vostro a bad laptop. Given the choice (and without looking at price), most people will prefer the Latitude models, but price almost always comes into play. There are other factors as well that may or may not matter to potential buyers. The Latitude laptops support docking stations and usually have at least one more USB port, and they go through additional validation testing—similar to how Intel and AMD test their Xeon and Opteron processors more rigorously than they do their consumer CPUs. In short, you give up some things by opting for Vostro over Latitude, but for some the tradeoffs will be perfectly acceptable.

Wrapping things up, I’m impressed on one level with how much you can get for a reasonable price. There are plenty of $600-$700 laptops out there, but a lot of them feel very cheap and flimsy and come with a generic 1-year warranty. (If you actually have to send a laptop back for repairs in the first year, let’s be clear: the laptop is a lemon.) The Vostro is thin but still feels reasonably durable, and the hinges are still metal so they’re not as apt to wear out after 18 months. Provided you’re not banging your laptop around, I can easily see the Vostro lasting through a few years of use, and the fact that Dell will sell you a 3-year NBD warranty for $80 extra indicates that they feel it should last at least that long without issues. Yes, it’s clearly a step down from enterprise class laptops in build quality and materials, but it’s also about half the price of a similarly equipped E6420.

To get into the specifics, if you start with the $919 Latitude E6420, you’ll need to bump up to 6GB RAM and a 500GB HDD, add a webcam and Bluetooth module, and the final tally comes to $1150 (with the current $448 rebate—again, prices are subject to fluctuations). The Latitude comes with a 3-year NBD on-site warranty standard, and perhaps more importantly there’s a $79 upgrade to a “Premium Panel” 1600x900 LCD. Such a configuration will weather the years better; however, for the price you can buy two Vostro laptops, or buy one Vostro now and upgrade to a new model Vostro in a couple years. You end up spending about the same amount, but which will be best in the long term is something of a personal/business decision. I know I’d prefer to spend more for a laptop I’m happy using, and I’ve had conversations with quite a few others who have used both Latitude and Vostro and they tend to feel the same, but if you’re looking to save some money for your business, the Vostro line is certainly a viable option.

Dell Vostro V131: What’s in a Name? Vostro V131: Let’s See the Benchmarks
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  • retrospooty - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    "1360x768 for a "business" laptop?! Seriously, give me a break"

    All low end laptops start with this, business or personal... Its extremely irritating, most people buy it not knowing, and on the business end, some IT dept's buy it cheaply not caring.

    Unfortunately, its cheap, and it sells more than any other res, so they keep making them and the cycle continues.
  • Pirks - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    hey retro did you see this one? ==>> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/why-p...

    I know it's offtopic, still wanna know if you saw this :)
  • retrospooty - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    meh... that guy is just an Anti Android troll and has no idea what he is talking about with regards to smartphones, or IT's take on it.

    This is more the real deal =)

    http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/26/technology/rim_pla...
  • Pirks - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    This doesn't touch businesses though who use bridge and because of bridge they don't care about consumer email clients or consumer Android apps. Since businesses are the primary target for RIM they couldn't care less about consumer backlash for now. And Apple controls consumers anyway so why bother.

    I see RIM promoting PlayBook for businesses mostly these days, they don't yet have ammo to fight Apple for consumer dollar, they just released PlayBook NDK and the 3D games like N.O.V.A. 2 and more serious apps like Skype Android port just started to appear in the App World.

    Probably it's like six more months until they release next version of PlayBook OS and maybe then they could see some success in fighting against Apple. They also have an option of undercutting the Apple price since with time manufacturing costs go down.

    Apple is obsessed with huge bulky 10" designs with beefy and expensive GPUs to drive high resolution screens and this drives manufacturing costs up a lot, RIM can exploit this fact with their smaller lighter 7" form factor. They already did it this month during two promotional sales weeks, I see more of that coming as manufacturing costs keep going down.
  • silverblue - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    We've gone for the i5-2430M model. I'm a fan of the fact that skipping from 320GB to 500GB hard drive costs a mere £10 (approx. $16 - take note, Apple). Additionally, there's no 6GB option here - we chose 8GB. Shame the SSD option is so expensive - add £180 ($290), and the RAM upgrade from 4GB to 8GB is £100 ($161) though you do end up with a dual channel machine at that point.

    To save going into too much detail, here's the UK version of said machine:

    http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.as...

    We've bought it for our (interim) head so I'm sure we'll know about any problems soon enough. ;)
  • fokka - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    first i want to thank you for the great review! anandtech is the go-to site if you really wanna know whats inside a machine! thanks.

    i live in austria and got my first vostro (1310) in 2008. back then they were quite a bit thicker and built 100% out of plastic, but still delivered the best bang for the buck, imho. i only made the mistake of "upgrading" to a geforce 8400gs and while gaming on low details (gta san andreas!) was great, of course the gpu died on me, although i copper-modded it for better cooling.

    thats when i first came in contact with the dell business service, which is nothing but world class support. they fixed the issue (new mainboard) and the machine is running strong since then.

    in my opinion its hard to get better laptops than the vostros for that little money, which is the reason i recommend them to people who are looking for a everyday-machine and want to stay under, say, 800€.

    especially the new series (3300 and newer) dont fail to impress me, since they are quite thin and feel very sturdy.
  • kmmatney - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    I'm using a 2007 17" Dell Inspiron with a dual core T7200 (2 Ghz, 4 MB cache) and a 1920 x 1200 true-life display and is talking about "upgrading" me to a 17" version of this. I'm a bit torn - I love my current screen, and I upgraded my current system with an SSD and maximized the RAM, and it's quite a fast system. Even though I typically run the system at 1440 x 900 resolution, I like the possibility of running at 1920 x 1200 when I need to. I really wish they still made 1920 x 1200 displays...
  • nklak - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    My company is dell direct partner in Europe and I as manager recently choosed this little vostro for my new laptop replacing HP models after 10years. What made me do this is the size of laptop and battery life as I am always on the move and carry notebook with myself 24/7. For strict bussines use even i3 is good enough, SSD is for speed lovers, and this should be enough for 90+% of bussines users.What is bad and what was the ONE AND ONLY reason to dump this notebook is LCD. Crap resolution, shit quality (color quality, wash away effect, very bad angles etc). End of discussion, deal breaker. I spend my 10+ working hours WATCHING at this screen, for proffesionals it should be biggest issue over everything else. I have money, I can afford latitude no problems, but trust me no latitude model is match for this little fellow in usability/portability. 6420 is just to big/heavy for me (who else still need optical drive inside). This is reason apple made it right. They made it like Steve liked it, and everyone else said WOW. I personaly can not use mac, and what makes me thinking is why nobody took their aproach. When you build bussines notebook build what bussines man needs. Try not to pack everything inside, you cant please all. Home users got inspiron, power users XPS, latitude can be for professionals top speced, but be rare manufacturer who makes bussines notebooks and make Vostro a bussines laptop. Needed options, top quailty, and I am in. Right now, mr. dell, one of your partners just ordered sony for himself...
  • Stuka87 - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    The next BDS still works pretty well. I ended up having my Precision 4500 replaced due to BSOD's that they could not track down. And lucky for me, it go replaced with a brand new M4600, which I have to say, is a great machine. I have been very happy with it.
  • Stuka87 - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    Oh, and as for the Vostro, never been a huge fan of them. Although it looks like this one may be a step up from previous models.

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