Before we discuss the good and bad of this notebook, let's look @ the spec of it first:


Spec
- P!!! 850Mhz with SpeedStep
- 64 MB RAM (exp. to 512 MB)
- 5 GB HDD
- ATi Mobility Pro 8 MB SGRAM for graphic
- 14.1" TFT XGA Screen
- 16 bit ESS Chip for sound
- 1 USB, Fast Infared, P/S 2, VGA, Parallel, Serial Ports
- 56K Modem & 10/100 Ethernet
- (W) 12.5" X (H) 1.47" X (D) 10.0"
- 8X4X24X CD-RW


Background
After using the Acer TravelMate 602TER for about half a year, I decided to lend it to my brother and buy myself a new one. Since I already got some experience with laptop, I expect the one to be even better when compared to my old TM 602TER.


Reasons for buying
Although there are quite a lot of good notebooks on the market, none of them has the ability to provide the features and hardware that I got from Dell. And most importantly, Dell is known as best at customer servicing, so I am quite comfortable making this big purchase.


Good
The performance of this notebook is simply awesome! Fast, fast, and fast. CPU is fast(of course, that's 850Mhz). HDD is also fast(made by IBM). The screen of my laptop is crisp and 14.1" is certainly quite large for a laptop with this kind of small dimension. I bought this notebook with 64 MB RAM because I could get another stick of 128 MB cheap from crucial.com(of course, a lot cheaper than what Dell asks for). The laptop sports 2 RAM slots with 1 occupied, meaning upgrading the laptop wouldn't be difficult.


This notebook has one hot-swappable multi-purpose media bay. This enables you to hot swap the included optical drive(CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, or CD-RW) and the floppy drive. The floppy drive can also be connected externally with a provided parallel cable, however. The Sony CD-RW I bought works flawlessly but I couldn't get my Nero Burning Rom to recognize it so I am using Easy CD Creator instead.


With both the traditional touchpad and eraserhead-like mouse placed on this machine, you can rest assure that you won't have a hard time to get used to either one. Having 2 PCMCIA slots is good, even though I doubt it is useful for most users since both 56K modem and ethernet card are integrated. The battery of this machine is around 3 hours. This is an okay battery runtime when compared to my old TravelMate 602TER, which can last for around 5 hours long.


Bad
1 USB port is definitely not enough, considering how many devices use the USB interface. Also, The laptop gets hot. Although this may not be a very big problem, it IS annoying. And like most of the other members say, the speakers on each side are quite weak, but this does not matter when you connect your external speakers to the notebook. Last but not least, the HDD is very noisy, although its performance is not bad. I doubt Dell can do anything for this issue, however.


Conclusion
This notebook is one of the best that you can find nowadays. If you can live with the noisy HDD and don't use alot of USB devices, I would recommend this sweat notebook to you!


Thanks
Thanks for spending your valuable time reading this epinion! Please feel free to check out my other reviews on various products:
http://www.epinions.com/user-cyrustch?show=content

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 2000
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 801-900
RAM: 64
Internal Storage: CD-RW
Hard Drive (GB): Under 4