Great laptop
Written: Nov 23 '00
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Pros: Powerful, nice looking, good value.
Cons: Intel chips always drag great products down.
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| ChrisHall79's Full Review: Dell Inspiron 5000e Series |
I purchased a Dell Inspiron 5000e because I wanted something else to play with. Ok, not the best reason to buy a $3,000 laptop, but a reason. Dell beat their estimated ship date by over a week. I bought a Gateway desktop system earlier in the year and it was nearly a month late. And $50 for shipping isn’t that bad for UPS insured shipping.
Anyone can benefit from this product. Whether you are looking for a computer for your home. Or if you a professional who needs to stay mobile and still have a lot of power. The whole way down to the weekend warrior. The machine has a nice design and plenty of power and usability inside.
The machine I purchased was a model with the following specifications. It is a 600Mhz Pentium III Processor with Speed Step. So this means as soon as you unplug it from the wall, your brand new 600Mhz PIII turn into a 400Mhz PIII. The feature can be turned off, but your battery will get killed. I had 128 MB of memory installed, because, lets face it. You cannot survive with anything less these days. It uses a 20 GB removable hard drive for transporting, and storing large amounts of information. A built in 56kbps modem for the Internet. It uses a 16MB ATI Mobility video card. Sure you only need 8, but it was only an extra $50. A swappable bay is used for switching out my 24x CD-ROM with my second battery. The dual battery is nice if you are planning on being without power for a while but you loose the ability to use your CD drive. It has plenty of ports including: phone line, power, headphones, speaker, microphone, (2) PCMCIA slots, docking port, PS/2, serial, parallel, S-Video, monitor, and a USB Port. This is all topped of with a 15.1” Active Matrix XGA screen.
I like the machine a lot but the following things I do not like about it. It was shipped with one bad pixel. I know there are millions on the screen, but it’s the one that always stays blue that bugs me to death. I called Dell and they said that one bad pixel is well within the industry standard and not able to be repaired. They did offer a one-time replacement. But if the one they replaced it with had more then one bad pixel I’d be stuck with it for good. No surprise, Gateway, IBM and most other companies have the same policy. After paying three grand for a computer this seemed unacceptable. Speedstep is another problem. I don’t know what Intel was thinking, but this is a horrible feature. Rather then making batteries last longer. Maybe using Lithium-Polymer instead of Lithium Ion batteries, they make the processor slow down. Stepping over the mess rather then cleaning it. It came with Windows Millennium installed, but the stickers on the laptop say it was designed for Win98 and Win2000. Also due to the large screen size, the screen actually overhands the base of the laptop by a little. The screen isn’t exposed, but it doesn’t give you that tight appearance.
I chose Dell because they are a good company overall. Even the best companies don’t always do the best things. I liked the features that were available at the time. As I look back I should have held out until AMD released a mobile version of the Athlon. But all in all it is a very good machine and I would recommend it.
So far I enjoy using my Cassiopeia E-125 with the laptop. I also like Infrared printing with my Hewlett Packard 990Cse. Rand McNally’s GPS system works great with the machine. I will never get lost at 2 a.m. under the “L” in Philly again. My Canon S-100 digital camera also works very well through the installed USB Port.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 2,980.00
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 501-600
Screen Size: Greater than 15"
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: CD-ROM
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
ChrisHall79
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Member: Chris Hall
Location: York, Pennsylvania
Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 0 members
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