Desktop or Notebook?? (Dell Inspiron 7500)

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Product:	Dell Inspiron 7500
Date:	30/06/00 (324 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Powerful

Disadvantages: Very Heavy

Some notebooks are better left on your desk. Case in point: the nearly ten-pound Dell Inspiron 7500 G650VT, which might dislocate your shoulder if you try to travel often with it. But left aside, the Inspiron 7500 offers greater speed and battery life and more advanced specs than nearly any other notebook.
Superior Speed and Battery Life
The $4,238 Inspiron 7500 G650VT showcases the new mobile Pentium III's SpeedStep technology, which allows the user to conserve battery life by lowering the processor's speed. On CNET Labs' business applications tests, the Inspiron (outfitted with 128MB of RAM and an 8MB ATI Rage Mobility graphics chip, and running full bore at 650 MHz) dusted all of its similarly configured competitors. Even when our Labs clocked its processor down to 500 MHz, the Inspiron still outpaced the competition.

The Inspiron's battery life is just as impressive as its performance. Running at 500 MHz, the Dell achieved nearly three hours on the tests. Stepping up its processor to maximum speed, however, reduced that life by a short 6 minutes. Tasks that are more processor-intensive than those run by our Labs, however, will likely whittle away additional minutes.

Fully Loaded
The Inspiron's full complement of first-rate components leaves no room for complaints. Our configuration ships with an almost comically large 25GB hard drive; an integrated 56k modem; a spacious, comfortable keyboard; a 15-inch, TFT display that supports true (32-bit) color at a high, 1,400-by-1,050-pixel resolution; and a combination 6X DVD-ROM/floppy drive in the system's modular bay. Opt for a combo 32X CD-ROM/floppy drive to fill the bay, and the price drops by $130. The bay also supports a combo CD-RW/floppy drive (a $181 upgrade), a combo 6X DVD-ROM/LS-120 drive (a $160 upgrade), a 25GB second hard drive ($795), a Zip drive ($139), and a second battery. One perk that we missed was a full software suit
e. Rather, Dell includes the abbreviated Microsoft Works.

If you can overlook the slight software flaw, you'll end up with an exceptional package overall, made even more so by Dell's solid, three-year warranty and unlimited, 24/7, toll-free tech support term.

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