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Dell Vostro V13

A business box to get your pulse racing - surely not?

The V13's screen has enough vertical resolution to show HD videos, but our performance tests were the one area where the V13 really disappointed. Running PCMark Vantage resulted in an overall score of 1776, but it's in use that the inadequacies of the single-core 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500 come to the fore.

Running Internet Explorer with more than half a dozen tabs open resulted in annoying delays when entering text, and attempting to watch HD videos from Vimeo.com proved impossible - the bitrate is so high as to produce stuttering, unwatchable playback.

PCMark Vantage Results

Dell Vostro V13
Dell Vostro V13

Longer bars are better

The charts tell it all: the V13 was well beaten by small notebooks - the 1810TZ and T110 - with lower-clock but two-core processors - and Pentiums, at that. We included the HP Envy to show what difference a full Core i7 CPU makes.

This particular model of the V13 is best saved for those who have already made the jump to cloud-computing - editing with Google Docs rather than Word, for instance. The V13 has 2GB of DDR 3 memory, but without sufficient computational oomph multitasking is all but out of the question.

PCMark Vantage Battery Life Results

Dell Vostro V13

Battery life in minutes
Longer bars are better

Next page: Verdict

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