Powerful & Portable

Well I received this laptop from my workplace and as the title says so far so good.

Not really being a fan of Dell products (I'd rather have a Thinkpad), I must say this is a fairly good machine. It's definitly above par in some areas and the size is great.

Look:
To begin, the casing is nice, plastic - nothing special about it, has a nice grey colour but the big pink parallel port at the back kind of stands out.

Feel:
Smooth, sturdy, nothing feels breakable and no moving parts on the outside.

Smell:
Right now, it has that "new car scent".

Connectivity:
1 PCMCIA Type 2
1 Headphones
1 Mic
1 IR port (located on the side, annoying if you want to transfer to someone else)
1 S-Video out
2 USB ports
1 LAN 10/100/1000
1 Modem (V.90)
1 Serial
1 VGA
1 Power
Wireless LAN A/B/G
Built in Bluetooth

I'm disappointed there is no Firewire. But the communication abilities of this laptop are great, gigabit LAN, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi.... Good work Dell!


Controls:

Keyboard with Fn key, nice feature of real arrow keys. Touch sensitive mouse surface and pointing stick, both with their own buttons (very cool). Power button, volume control, up/down/mute(VERY useful in a meeting!).

Okay, now that we have the basics, let's get down to the nitty gritty. Mine was sent with Windows XP Professional and a bunch of company software. It has an Intel Pentium Mobile @ 1400Mhz with 512MB of RAM. Don't neglect that RAM, you can really notice the difference it makes. I tried one with 384 MB, and it kinda chokes on some big macros in Access and Excel. In terms of processing speed and power, I think for the business user, this computer can really handle just about anything, even with wireless LAN (this does tend to slow down some laptops). For a student this is a good machine, in fact above average, Dell has some lower end models they gear towards students. This PC has a DVD-ROM with a CD-RW, more specifically a Samsung CDRW/DVD SN-324S, this is swappable with a second hard drive if you want.

The hard drive is a 37.2 Gigabyte Toshiba. Now so far I have had ZERO problems, and this drive spins up and performs great. HOWEVER, I was informed by our tech guy that certain models in the United States have had crashing hard drive syndromes. I suspect this was an isolated case and Dell has solved the issue, maybe just a bad batch.

The display adapter is very good, top notch. ATI Mobility Radeon 9000. A cool 32MB of video ram makes the 3D graphics good, in fact it could work well with some games; I haven't tried any but from what I've read it does fully support DirectX 8.1 features such as programmable pixel and vertex shaders. The chipset also is designed for longer battery life; which is always important. The chipset has the ability to scale down to lower or non-native resolutions, for example in video presentations or plasma screen output through a VGA cable or S-Video. DVD playback looks good, I just watched "The Sixth Sense" and it was great.

The display is at a good 14.1 inches, which is perfect. The display is crisp at 1024X768, I can't stand any other resolution. I've heard that you can upgrade the display to a 1400X1050 model, but I haven't seen it.

There are two crappy speakers on the front, and with your basic Sigmatel audio, don't expect much. But that's no big deal.

Battery life is average, 2 - 4 hours max, depending on usage and DVD rom usage.

As usual Dell Support is great.

To sum up, the value of this laptop is good, and for business use you can't go wrong, don't forget the extra RAM though.