Dell Vostro 1510 is available with a wide range of Intel chips right from 1.86 GHz Celeron M M540 to T9500 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo. There are four choices for the 15.4 inch display – WXGA+ or WXGA screen having matte anti-glare coating and WXGA+ or WXGA with ‘TrueLife’ glossy screen. This laptop can take a maximum for four GB RAM and Dell is offering 32 bit versions of Windows XP Professional or Microsoft Windows Vista Business. The price of the system is $599 and it comes with integrated X3100 Intel graphics. You can also choose to go with Nvidia 8400M GS discrete graphics but it will cost you more money.

Dell Vostro 1510 is lighter and thinner than a lot of other laptops from this manufacturer. This makes the system travel friendly but the thin and light profile also comes at a cost. For instance, the plastic material used in chassis feels a bit thin like on the palmrests and above the keyboard. The flex makes the system look cheap. The edges are sharper as compared to its predecesssors. This makes the laptop look unrefined and unfinished.

Dell Vostro 1510 doesn’t gives you any color choices or patterns for the display lid. You just get black. For this year’s products, the manufacturer has decided to sacrifice the black matte finish in favor of black glossy finish with some metal flake. The glossy finish won’t come off easily as the black paint is inlaid with the metal flakes.

I didn’t like the black glossy plastic lid simply because it attracts a lot of fingerprints. However, the metal flake paint on the lid looks and feels nice. Also noteworthy is that the lid is prone to scratches. Dell says that all new laptops in the Vostro line up have ‘Hyperbrand MultiAntenna’ inside the lid and it is supposed to give you better reception for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. To be frank, I’ve never had problems of dropped signals on laptops so I cannot tell you if the new antenna actually does anything for improving the wireless reception.

Dell Vostro 1510 has a 15.4’ XGA widescreen display with resolution of 1,280×800 pixels or higher resolution of 1,440×900 pixels on both glossy and matte configurations. I was quite happy with the screen of my review model and the picture quality remained good for different horizontal viewing angles. The upper vertical angles are pretty good and you just get a slight washed out look but at lower viewing angles, the colors began to invert when I tilted the display back.