Inspiron 1300 (Dell Inspiron in general)

Member Name: ChristopherEllis

Product:	Dell Inspiron in general
Date:	20/06/06 (275 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Wireless Networking, Widescreen option

Disadvantages: Stingy Memory, Meagre Hard Drive, Rip - Off upgrade prices

If you've recently seen a Dell advert for a laptop at a ludicrously low price, and let's face it - who hasn't - the chances are it's the Inspiron 1300 that's being plugged. Here I intend to concentrate solely on the hardware and general usability of this model. I do not intend to review Dell the company beyond saying that delivery for the laptop was outstanding (Ordered at 7.00pm on the Wednesday night, delivered at 11.00am on the Friday morning of the same week). Packaging was perfectly adequate and everything ordered arrived in mint condition.

The configurable specifications I ordered were:

Intel Celeron M 370
256MB 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM
40GB (5.400rpm) Hard Drive
15.4inch WXGA (1280x800) LCD Panel
90-Day Collect and Return service
Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition, SP2

I should state here and now that Dell have a different "special offer" practically every day of the week so it's almost impossible to get the same thing at the same price twice. That said, I paid silly money for this - honestly. £447 all in, including VAT and delivery. And there's the rub: I knew exactly what I wanted this laptop for, being a fairly experienced PC user. My main PC at home is a 6 year old self-built 1Ghz Athlon and it does everything I need, so I knew that 6 years on, the cheapest of cheap laptops would leave it in the shade performance wise, and it does. I also knew that I would be voiding the warranty on this laptop within days of unpacking it because the specifications I ordered are completely inadequate so I would be doing a spot of DIY upgrading at a price way below anything Dell could match, or any other PC retailer for that matter. For a first time, casual user - upgrading is probably the last thing you'd be wanting to do with a brand new laptop.

Let's go through the components piece by piece:

PROCESSOR

The Celeron M 370 has been specially developed by Intel for the mobile environment… yes ok, we've all seen the adverts and that rage inducing jingle. It's a processor, it's not the best in the world, but it'll cope with most things you throw at it, it'll just take a bit longer than the latest dual core 64 bit processors that are at the bleeding edge these days. We're not pretending this is a powerhouse but for spreadsheets, MP3 encoding, multimedia playback and my regular forays into Photoshop and occasionally Dreamweaver it's absolutely spot on. Don't try and play the latest games though - that would just be silly.

MEMORY

The standard 256MB is pathetic. Dell wanted an astonishing £123 to double this and they don't even have the decency to wear a mask. A well known and reputable online memory supplier (Crucial) got me a 512MB chip for £36, giving me 768MB all in. Fitting it was a two minute job and if you can hold a screw driver, you can do this too, believe me, it's that simple - truly. The laptop fairly skips along now and in a month or two I'll probably take out the 256MB chip supplied and spend another £36 to bring it up to 1024MB of RAM. The 1300 will take a maximum of 2048MB in it's two memory slots (2 x 1024).

40GB HARD DRIVE

This is pretty miserly by today's standards. Being an enthusiastic digital photographer and a voracious hoarder of MP3s, I would have filled this in no time at all so out it came and replaced it with a 100GB Toshiba drive (MK1032GAX) for the princely sum of £92.61(Dabs). Physically this was no harder than replacing the memory. Reinstalling the operating system and drivers however, is not for the faint hearted - more about this later.

15.4 INCH LCD

This gives plenty of screen real estate but the viewing angles are completely naff and there's some light bleed along the bottom of the screen too, which is a bit distracting. Let's be frank though, at this price range the screen is perfectly good enough - it's just not great. I was delighted to be able to get a widescreen LCD at this price (resolution 1280 x 800 pixels) and I've watched a couple of DVDs on it with no sign of ghosting or smearing so even given the obvious flaws, I'm still extremely happy. No dead pixels either.

OPERATING SYSTEM: WINDOWS XP HOME

Still not found a good reason to pay the extra 50 quid Dell wanted to go with XP Professional, answers on a postcard.

90 DAY COLLECT AND RETURN WARRANTY

Well, it was included in the price so what-the-hell. Replacing the hard drive put paid to that anyway - easy come easy go as they say (as far as I can see a memory upgrade alone does NOT void your warranty - check with Dell to be sure). Expect a phone call from Dell to try to get you to extend this to 3 years anyway as part of their after sales service, at a reduced price naturally… yawn…

That was what I could configure. Standard features are:

GRAPHICS

Graphics come courtesy of a Mobile Intel 915GM/GMS,910GML Express Chipset. This utilizes up to 128MB of the system RAM, rather than having its own and should cope with some basic 3D tasks, but this coupled with a weak processor means a game of Far Cry is out of the question - or so you would think! Never one to shirk a challenge, I installed Far Cry onto this machine and at medium settings (not low - medium), it ran just fine; yup, my jaw dropped too. So there you go - never underestimate cheap and cheerful.

60W AC ADAPTER

Kind of essential if you want to plug it in! Not the brick I was expecting though, only slightly larger than a cigarette packet with a 2 meter cable, which is nice.

INTERNAL 56K v.92 CAPABLE FAX MODEM

Good to have but won't be using it.

DELL™ WIRELESS 1370 802.11b/g MINI PCI CARD

That's a lot of numbers and I don't pretend to know what they all mean but it all adds up to wireless networking built in as standard. Haven't used it yet but will be delving into the world of networking in the next few months.

8X DVD+/-RW WITH SOFTWARE

An essential these days. The model in my 1300 is by NEC, well respected in this field but the software which came with it (Sonic) was not my cup of tea and I've replaced this with Nero.

3 x USB2 SOCKETS

For all those external peripherals (scanner, printer, external hard-drive, pen-drives etcetera).

10/100 NIC

For cable networking - pretty standard on all PC's today.

AVG OUT SOCKET

For attaching a second monitor or projector - again, a standard feature.

1 x EXPRESS CARD SLOT

This is an update to the more common PC Card slot, and to my mind future proofs the laptop. However - those with existing PC Cards are out of luck, the two are incompatible so PC Cards are redundant in this model. As it's such a new technology, Express Cards are thin on the ground at the moment, but amongst the first are Digital TV Tuners - future developments are rumored to include: memory, communications, multimedia and security. Make of that what you will.

That pretty much covers the standard hardware.


IN USE

On first use I found to my horror that Dell, in their wisdom, had installed a plethora of "trial" software - each and every bit of it completely useless (to my mind anyway). So job one was to get stuck in about Add/Remove Programs and uninstall the offending items. I then used a freeware registry cleaner (there are plenty of these) and cleaned up the detritus left behind by this wholesale massacre. On reflection, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by just leaving this until I got my new hard drive and waited until I undertook a fresh install, but either way, nobody in their right mind is going to leave their machine bulging at the seams with this rubbish!

Once you've done that, take a gander at the Application and System Logs found in Administrative Tools in the Control Panel. Here you'll find a sorry state of affairs with errors all over the shop. And no, it wasn't my software butchery that caused these - they dated to the moment I first switched it on. You'll be downloading a few fixes I guarantee it (they don't tell you that in the advert!) - and although there were no serious issues, it's still amateurish to allow this in the first place.

The touchpad is a fairly responsive affair, allowing navigation when you're without a mouse. I've no complaints about the handling of this at all.

The keyboard is also pretty good. The keys feel nice and springy with just the right amount of pressure required to operate. I've comfortably rattled off a few thousand words in one sitting without any problems.

The whole unit weighs approximately 3 kilograms and seems to be constructed rather well. I've not noticed any alarming flexibility, even when holding it one handed - which is probably not the smartest thing to be doing anyway.

Battery life is quoted at 2.2hrs with the standard 4 Cell 29Whr Primary Battery and with screen brightness turned all the way down, I reckon this is about right for light use. Figure on halving that if you're using the DVD drive for any length of time or giving the processor a hammering.

Aesthetically, I find the Inspiron 1300 quite pleasing. It has a silver plastic lid, black base unit and keyboard. It's not going to attract gasps of admiration and there's no pose factor but if you were concerned about that, you wouldn't be buying a budget laptop in the first place, would you?

Anyone who finds noise an issue will be pleased to learn that this laptop runs virtually silent.

I'd like to have seen at least one PS/2 socket for a mouse but as it is we have to squander a valuable USB socket for this purpose. Surely I'm not the only person in the world that thinks USB sockets are wasted on keyboards and mice?

There are a pair of speakers on the front of the 1300 which are, as one would expect, not so good - a podcast or speech sounds fine but for music, forget it - invest in some external speakers, either USB powered, or which utilize the headphone jack. Speaking of jack's there's a microphone jack too, but no microphone included. I don't see myself using that any time soon however. From my experience, unless you're actually making music, any soundcard will suffice for playback this has been borne out listening to MP3s both through headphones and portable speakers - they sound just fine.


CONCLUSION

Dell are advertising this laptop at a comical price to tempt you into paying well over the odds for the upgrades necessary to make this a good machine. Personally, I'm absolutely delighted with my purchase and feel like I've got a genuine bargain (you try getting a wide screen, 100GB HDD, 768MB laptop for £576 - that's including my extra expenditure on memory and hard drive). However, I can't hand-on-heart go recommending this model to all and sundry. If you're happy and comfortable to spend a few quid upgrading right away, then yes, the Inspiron 1300 might be for you. If you manage to get an offer from Dell (say free double memory and a larger hard drive) then yes, you'd be daft not too. Otherwise, I have to say no - give it a miss and look elsewhere. 256MB of memory just isn't good enough for a modern laptop and 40GB of hard drive space is not enough for the space hungry applications we use today

Summary: Cheap and Cheerful wireless computing.

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