Excellent Buy
Written: May 16 '00 (Updated May 16 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: large fine bright TFT, above avg battery life, withstands moderate abuse, desktop replacer
Cons: no svideo and cd/floppy bay not hot swappable
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| rshiroma's Full Review: Dell Inspiron 3500 A366GT |
I purchased the 3500 in January '99 for our construction field crew which uses global positioning systems for their area of work and I am simply amazed at the abuse it can take. Small drops here and there, red dirt, salt water air and the mud all washes easily off with a damp rag. The screen is a savvy 14 inch active matrix with a very fine dot pitch that rivals most CRT monitors. The image is bright and crisp and is my highest priority in choosing a laptop. My second highest criteria is battery life. The power saver mode in this sleek puppy averaged out to about 3.5 hours - long enough for any engineering presentation or construction field use. My third criteria is size and weight ratios. This underrated workhorse is a bit on the heavy side when loaded into the carrying case with all its accessories. The unit itself is a thin 1.2" weighing in at roughly 7 lbs with lion battery and cdrom installed. With the case and all accessories come out to about 11 lbs. This includes floppy drive, external mouse, AC power adapter, Dell surge blocker, security cable/lock, and all necessary cables.
The unit comes with a v.90 built in modem jack that easily connects to ISP or RAS servers. The floppy and cdrom can be connected at the same time via a parallel port dongle that is included with the unit. The stereo speakers are fairly clear at high volumes eliminating the need for external speakers during small presentations. The keyboard takes some time to get adjusted to mainly from the short key travel. The controls are intuitive and easy to understand and includes inverted T arrows and a 10key keypad. My only gripes are no svideo jacks and the cd/floppy bay is not hot swappable. I also redid the Dell hard drive scheme to be more similar to our workstation drive scheme which greatly improves performance and maintenance. This unit now performs exactly like a desktop and is very much hassle free. Application loads are snappy and the hard drive is fairly quick. The unit connects nicely to many 10/100 ethernet systems via our 3com pcmcia card and till today gets high remarks from clients and corporates that see it in use.
My only other recommended buy that outperforms this one is the IBM Thinkpadi 1482 celeron all-in-one design series. Celeron junk you say? A secret many misunderstand.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
rshiroma
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Member: Randy Shiroma
Location: Hawaii
Reviews written: 29
Trusted by: 4 members
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