Dell Inspiron 8500 (Dell Inspiron in general)

Member Name: Peter_P

Product:	Dell Inspiron in general
Date:	16/12/03 (427 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Impressive speed, great wide screen , wireless card

Disadvantages: A little out of most people's price range

The Inspiron 8500 is a visually striking notebook. It is shipped in one of five colours through the use of interchangeable snap-on covers. My model is the Venice Blue version, whose cover, keyboard and touchpad inlays are blue. In addition to the two standard touchpad buttons, there are two more just below the keyboard, with four CD control keys to the right and two volume control buttons. The excellent keyboard is large and well organised; it is very comfortable to use and of high build quality. It also includes the type of nipple pointing device seen on IBM notebooks.


The newly designed chassis has plenty of room for connections, including headphone and microphone sockets, a single PCMCIA card slot, one four-pin FireWire port, infrared, parallel, serial, D-Sub (VGA), Ethernet, modem, S-video out and two USB2 ports. It also comes with an integrated Dell TrueMobile 1180 Mini-PCI card that supports both 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networking protocols.


Its core configuration is made up of the 2.4GHz mobile Pentium 4 chip, a 40GB hard disk, 512MB DDR 2100 RAM (maximum installable 2GB) and the nVidia GeForce4 420 Go video chipset with 64MB memory. Although there is no floppy drive, there is a DVD/CD-RW combo drive that writes CD-Rs at 24X. The 15.4" wide screen has a maximum resolution of 1,920x1,200 and is ideal for design applications or watching DVDs.


Dell supplies the machine with Windows XP Home Edition and a copy of Microsoft Works 7.0. It also ships with a three-year onsite international warranty covering parts and labour. The Inspiron isn't small - it measures 38x361x276mm and weighs approximately 3kg - but it is light enough to be comfortably carried.


Performance is impressive, with a battery life of just under 160 minutes. In part this is down to its powerful mobile processor, which gives excellent performance without draining the battery too much, but all the other components certainly pul
l their weight. This is reflected in the Inspiron's ability to handle just about every application around, including the latest games, thanks to its capable graphics chipset.


There is only one real problem with the Inspiron 8500: at over £1,700 it will be beyond most people's budgets. However, if you use the online configurator when buying to remove some of the more high-end features, you can shave quite a bit off the price. It performs well, looks great and has a couple of excellent features in the shape of the screen and dual band wireless networking. Dell's Inspiron 8500 comes highly recommended by me for those who are looking for power on the move.

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