The New Dell Notebook Hits the Sweet Spot Saturday, November 24, 2007 |
Notebooks below $ 1,000 may grab your attention, but features can get a bit light. If you're willing to let the float price up a few hundred dollars, you will get far more for your money. With the Dell Inspiron 5100 desktop replacement notebook ($ 1456 direct, as tested), for instance, you get productivity software, decent multimedia abilities, and surprisingly good battery life. Most Popular Articles In Technology * Sound Solutions-... * Ultrasonic ... * Understanding C # ... * Boost Mobile and AirG ... * High-density server ... * More " Our unit had a fair-to-good feature set, but included nothing that would push the price anywhere near $ 2000. Thus the system came with a 2.4-GHz Pentium 4-the slowest of four processors Dell offers, but still adequate-and 256MB of RAM. The monitor was the midlevel Inspiron offering, 15 inches instead of 14, not XGA and SXGA +. All laptops in the 5100 line have a pair of USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, and an S-Video output for a TV set. Ours included 802.11b wireless Ethernet in addition to standard wired Ethernet and a modem, a fixed DVD / CD-RW drive, and a 16MB USB memory key instead of a floppy disk drive. There's a lot of real estate for showing off the striking finish, done in what Dell calls Moonlight Silver accented by Venice Blue. The system measures 1.8 by 13.1 by 10.8 inches (HWD), has a system weight of 8.2 pounds, and a travel weight with the change of 9.5 pounds-hefty even by desktop replacement standards. Some of the bulk comes from the 12-cell, 1.4-pound lithium ion battery; most batteries are 0.9 to 1.1 pounds. Nevertheless, the charge lasted 3 hours 41 minutes on our Business Winstone BatteryMark 2002 test-competing systems are hard-pressed to break 2:30. The 21.4 on Business Winstone 2002 and 29.2 on Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 are in line with what we'd expect from a 2.4-GHz P4 processor and about four-fifths of the scores newer Pentium M (Centrino) CPUs deliver. Advertisement With the included MusicMatch Jukebox 7.1 (called Dell Jukebox), Roxio Easy CD Creator 5, and Jasc Image Expert 2000 (rebranded Dell Picture Studio), you're adequately set up for tasks involving music and photos. But beyond its FireWire port, our 5100 was less suited for video editing-there's only a 30GB hard drive, no video software other than the clunky Microsoft Windows MovieMaker 1.1, and no writable DVD drive option. The WordPerfect Productivity Pack with Quicken 2002 New User Edition is also part of the bundle as is the Dell Security Pack, which includes McAfee VirusScan, Personal Firewall Plus, and Privacy Service. For the most part, these are not the best or newest applications. You may want to consider upgrades. $ 20 extra buys a better version of MusicMatch, $ 30 upgrades Image Expert to the Premium version, and $ 15 will replace WordPerfect with Microsoft Word and Works Suite 2003. For the price, the Inspiron 5100 is a good deal, and you're better served by picking the more fully equipped model than the $ 1099 entry model. Conversely, those who do little more than Web browsing, e-mailing, and word processing can save $ 200 with the $ 899 Celeron-based Inspiron 1100. Copyright © 2003 Ziff Davis Media Inc.. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine. | ||||
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