I got my machine used from a corporate lease sale at a great price (less than $600). I wanted to replace my old HP omnibook for business app functions, and to use win 2000 to match my desktop. This being my 4th laptop, I knew I did not want to compromise on the screen quality.

My first impression about the Inspiron was that it looked quite handsome. No, it is not fancy with all the multicolor panels that some of the notebooks come with nowadays, but in a very understated manner, the Dell looked proportionately right. The notebook is lighter than it looks.

Installation of Win2000 went smoothly, and with a few driver downloads from the web, the notebook was up and running. I was concerned that the notebook (mine is a PII-266 model) would be a little slow, but even with the initial 64 megs of RAM, it ran well. I easily upgraded the RAM to 196 total (124 meg RAMs are only $55 nowadays!) and on most business task, I notice little difference between the Inspiron and my Athlon 700 desktop! I love this machine!

The harddrive is a fast, albeit a little noisy, IBM drive. No problems so far. My one concern about this is that it looks like the harddrive would be a pain to upgrade. No easy access like the omnibook. Just as well, probably, as how many people upgrade their notebook harddrives anyway? 1 in 100?

I noticed that some people complained about having problems with the suspend feature. Dell has acknowledged that this was a faulty RAM problem, which they fixed with a simple replacement program. It isn't a notebook problem at all. I have had no problems whatsoever with power management with this machine, and it is actually the first notebook that has been so nice to me, power-wise.

As I mentioned before, RAM upgrades are cheap (checkout the crucial memory site), and the maximum RAM it can handle is 256.

Among other features, the screen is perfect, the video chipset is fast, keyboard is nice and big, all the ports are in the "right" place (experienced notebook users know what I mean), and there are no funky installation issues. Very standard. I used an external USB cd-rw drive with no problems. I love this machine.

My one tiff: the trackpad. They are simply annoying. But then again, it is an issue that I have with all trackpads, not just this one. I hate the eraser pointers as well. (Why don't they use optical trackballs in notebooks?)

As this was a refurb unit, I do not know about the tech support, although Dell is regularly rated well.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 560
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium II
Processor speed: 201-300
Screen Size: 14
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-ROM