The Dell Inspiron 9200 is Dell’s showcase notebook PC for multimedia enthusiasts. As with most Dell products, the 9200 is available with a lot of options, though even the base model makes for a pretty powerful notebook. Key specs for the 9200 are (parentheses show the model purchased)…
Pentium M processor, 1.6-2.1Ghz (1.8Ghz Pentium M 745)
17” widescreen display, WXGA or UXGA (17” wxga, 1440 x 900 resolution)
256mb-2gb 333mhz ram (512mb)
8X DVD Rom;or 24X CDRW/DVDRom; or 8x CD/DVD /-RW dual layer (24X CDRW/DVDRom)
40-100 gb hard drive (60gb)
53 whr 6 cell or 80whr 9 cell Li-ion battery (53whr)
Optional Intel or Dell wireless adapters b and/or g, and/or a (Intel Pro 2200 wifi b/g adapter)
Lots of I/O, including a firewire port, 4 USB 2.0 ports, sd card reader, 15 pin vga, DVI, and S video connectors, audio and microphone jacks, 10/100 Ethernet and v.92 56K modem connectors, and PC card slot
Taking advantage of a Dell pre Christmas 25% off coupon, I purchased this laptop for $1460, before $40 rebate, which I chose over a free low end Dell printer. My order only included the minimum in software applications, Power DVD, Wordperfect, and trial/lite versions of McAfee antivirus, Sonic RecordNow, Dell Picture Studio, and Musicmatch.
In the Box and Setup
"In the box" you'll find the Inspiron 9200 itself, a powerblock, large color quickstart guide, Windows Reinstallation and application cd’s, and a warranty safety manual. A hard copy manual was not included. The only cable included was the power cable.
Setup was easy, plug it in and turn it, and follow through the short windows setup wizard and registration. You’ll also need to register the McAfee AV software to get updates. The wireless card immediately recognized the wireless b network in my home. Once I entered my wireless security key and ran the Windows Network setup wizard, I was able to access the interet and other computers on my home network.
Appearances and Controls
The 9200 is 1.6 inches thick, 15.5 inches wide, and 11.3 inches deep. The weight is just under 8 lbs, pretty reasonalbe for a laptop with a 17" display. The laptop is silver with glossy white trim(Dell calls it Arctic Silver with Alpine White Trim), and seems solidly built.
The controls are, for the most part, located logically and are reasonably intuitive. The keyboard is a typical laptop keyboard, with keys located a little too tightly together, and a couple keys located in locations that are just enough different from a normal desktop keyboard to be annoying, even though the large size of this laptop would allow a more conventional layout. The touchpad is better than most others I’ve used. Even though its located below the space bar, its far enough away that I don’t often tap it accidentally while typing. The touchpad also has horizontal and vertical scroll bars, great easing the transition from a mouse to the scroll pad. The scroll bars work just like the wheel on a mouse, gliding your finger up and down the scroll bar scrolls a page up/down or left/right without moving the mouse pointer. Simulating drag and drop on a touch pad is still touch and go for me, double tapping on a item is supposed to be like holding a mouse button on an item so I can drag it somewhere, but I usually have to try 2 or 3 times before it works. But this is the easiest to use touchpad I’ve ever tried, thanks to the scroll bars.
Other nice touches include the row of multimedia keys on the front edge of the bottom half of the laptop. The first three mute, raise and lower volume. These are followed by play/pause, next track, previous track and stop buttons. These buttons are backlit in with “dell blue” lighting. Each time you touch a button, all the buttons light up for a few seconds. Most of the commonly used connectors are conveniently located on the left or right side of the laptop for easy access. On the left are two usb ports and the optical drive. On the right are the audio jacks, firewire port, sd card slot, PC card slot, and access to the hard drive bay. All of the rest of the I/O, including two more usb ports, are on the back of the laptop.
Using the 9200
Playing Music and DVD’s
The Inspiron is great to look at and listen to. DVD’s look great, sharp images, accurate colors and smooth playback all appear to be easy for the Inspiron 9200. The speakers are by far the best I’ve heard in a laptop, with the ability to fill a small room with sound, though there is a bit of distortion at maximum volume. (Dell says the system includes a subwoofer built in, but I couldn't identify one by looking at the laptop.) It won’t replace your stereo, but you’ll find yourself playing music and DVD’s to impress your friends. The included Cyberlink DVD and Dell Multimedia Experience software is formatted for viewing at a some distance. If you purchase a remote to control this laptop (like the ATI Remote Wonder or the optional Dell remote), and connect the laptop to your television screen via the S video output , you’ll be able to read the menu’s easily from 10 feet or more away. Dell’s Multimedia Experience software provides a “formatted for a TV screen” interface for playing music, video’s and viewing image files, while PowerDVD does the same for DVD’s.
Battery Life
The included 53whr battery is rated by Dell for 3.4 hours of routine usage. Normal usage, with stops and starts and different applications varies a lot from user to user, but this number is believable, based on my experience with the 9200. In a more “reproducable” test, I charged the battery fully and set the laptop to play DVD’s (Disks 2 and 3 from the Season 3 set of Farscape), with the volume at 20% (a comfortable volume in a quiet room). Under these conditions, battery life was a very respectable 2 hours and 42 minutes. Battery life with the optional 80whr battery would be 50% greater than this.
Recharging is quick, I can recharge the battery from 0% to a full charge in under 2 hours. The powerblock/cables are extremely well designed. The powerblock is about 1” thich, 2” wide, and 6” long, and slightly concave on each end. Two cords are attached to the power block, a 3” cord which runs to the wall receptacle, and a 5’ cord which runs to the laptop. When not in use, the cords can be looped around the concave ends of the powerblock, and held in place with an elastic strap permanently attached to the powerblock. This helps keep cords from tangling in your laptop case, a small, but much appreciated feature. The battery is easy swapped out, a springloaded locking mechanism holds it in place in the bottom of the laptop.
When the system is powered externally, the screen is set at full brightness, the cpu at max, and the wifi adapter is on. When powered by battery, several changes are made to conserve battery power while still providing adequate performance. Dell also provides a system tray utility to configure these options, or switch between power savings options which you can define. The predifined options include maximum battery life, maximum performance, a "presentations" configuration, and a "network" off configuration.
Performance
The ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 Pro 3d graphics chip with 128mb of dedicated memory, 512mb system memory and 1.8ghz Pentium M745 cpu should make this laptop a passable gaming machine. I ran a few gaming benchmarks on this laptop, and compared those to my desktop PC (Pentium IV 2.66ghz cpu with 128 Radeon 9800 pro graphics card), as well as a few other benchmark systems. I ran all of these benchmarks with the laptop plugged into external power.
Aquamark3 and 3DMark2003 are two popular benchmark utilities that use game graphics to estimate benchmark ratings for video cards. I got the following results with Aquamark 2003 and 3DMark 2003 using the default settings (1024X768):
Aquamark3
Overall 26689
CPU 8888
GFX 3138
Ave FPS: 26.7
(This compares to an average Aquamark3 FPS of 37.23 for my 2.66ghz desktop/ATI 9800 Pro.)
3DMark2003
3DMark Score 3422 3DMarks (My desktop rated at 5665 on the same test.)
CPU Score 715.0 CPUMarks
Wings of Fury 125 fps
Battle of Proxycon 19.9 fps
Troll's Lair 18.5 fps
Mother Nature 23.2 fps
I also ran Sisoft Sandra’s Multimedia instructions and Arithmetic benchmarks.
Multimedia instructions
17099 integer it/s
18832 it/s floating point
Arithmetic CPU
Dhrystone alu 7732mips
Whetstone fpu 2495
Whetstone iSSE2 3191mips
I realize these numbers won’t mean much alone, but when comparing the cpu numbers to other measurements in the Sisoft database, they indicate this system is about on par with Athlon XP2400 or 2600 systems or Pentium 4 systems in the 2.4ghz to 2.66 ghz range, ie near state of the art desktops 18 months ago, making it one of the fastest centrino laptops available (especially if you opt for the fastest 2.1ghz Pentium M765 cpu). The graphics numbers, while excellent for a laptop, are a couple steps below “state of the art for desktops today, “adequate” for most gaming, but would probably require some tradeoffs when running the newest 3d games.
Display
Dell doesn’t publish much in the way of specifications on this laptop’s screen, which, to my eyes, seems to me to be a pretty good screen. Viewing angles on the Inspiron 9200 are good, but not great. Left and right viewing angles are very good, 60 degrees or more. However, viewing angles from below vertical (if the screen is tilted back) are not as good, if your screen is tilted back more that 10 or 20 degrees, you lose some of the ability to distinguish between subtle shades of dark black or bright whites (contrast becomes poor). Viewing angles from above are much better, and I find viewing from angle about 5 or 10 degrees above vertical to be a bit better than looking right at the screen.
Pixel response time is very good. Again, Dell doesn’t spell out response times, but I’ve compared the response time of the 9200’s display with a Planar PX191 (25ms, 15ms rise and 10ms fall)LCD display and a Sceptre X9G Komodo II* (25ms, 10ms rise, 15ms fall)display, and the 9200 screen’s response time “looks” slightly better than both of those.
Pixel response time is the time required for a pixel to change from 10% of full white (almost black) to 90% of full white (the rise time), plus the time to “fall” back down from 90% to 10% again (the fall time). Usually pixel response time will vary with brightness and contrast and color, and this variation may be different on different monitors. A good LCD monitor will have a pixel response time of 20-25ms (20 to 25 milliseconds), while response time on a CRT is not a factor, typically being 3ms or less. The higher the response time, the more items will blur as they move across your screen. If the fall time is high, you’ll see a longer trail, if the rise time is high, the front edge of moving items will be blurry. I find fall time to be a bit more noticeable than rise time, but both make fast moving images blurry.
To “look” at pixel response time I downloaded and ran a freeware utility called Pixel Persistence Analyzer, a small, but extremely “neat” utility that helps users evaluate response times several ways. One tool moves text across the screen at different speeds. For each speed you type in the text you can see, with faster moving text being hard to identify. Another tool moves two blocks across this screen at a constant, fairly quick speed, starting at 1” apart. You move the two blocks together until the (blurry) front edge of one touches the trailing edge of another. The computer uses this distance to give an indication of response time. Using these tests, the program gives you an fairly good indication of the true response time of a display, which I judge to be about 25ms. The rise time and fall time appear to be about equal, which also helps minimize the amount of blurriness you actually see. Transitions between some colors, like blue to white, seem to be handled better than the black to white transition.
I also ran Displaymate on this laptop to check a few other few other features. Contrast in not a strength of the 9200’s display, its not as good as it is on my Planar PX191 (a monitor which is noted for distinguishing between the very dark blacks and whitest whites), but it was about on par with other monitors I use often (a Scepter X9G and Dell 1901fp). On this laptop there is no contrast adjustment, only brightness. When the laptop is powered externally brightness is set at maximum. When under battery power, brightness is lowered to about 60% (a value you can set), which makes it a bit more difficult to distinguish levels of black. The ability of this screen to contrast between very dark levels of and bright white is on par with a good entry level desktop LCD monitor, meaning if you are watching a DVD or playing a game where the displayed images are at night or in darkness, you might notice less detail than you would with a high end display, but its not a serious problem.
Otherwise I found the display quality to be excellent. Colors are displayed brightly, accurately and evenly across the screen. No dead pixels were noted (and I checked closely for all colors). Moire or pincushion effects were not a problem. Text is very readable even with 6 point fonts, and there is no distortion at the edges or elsewhere on the screen.
Storage
I purchased the slower 60gb harddrive with the Inspiron 9200 (a 60gb 7200 rpm drive was available for $72 more). However, the drive installed in my unit was an acceptably fast (in the world of laptops) a 2.5" Fujitsu MHT2060A 5400 rpm ATA 100 drive with an 8mb buffer and an average read seek time of 12 seconds. The drive also seems to run very quiet. Sisoft Sandra’s FileSystem Benchmark for this drive was 26mb/sec, on par with 3 ½” 5400 rpm desktop drives (a 100gb 5400 rpm Deskstar rates 29mb/sec, for example). Sisoft Sandra also reported a average access time of 11ms, vs the mfrs’ rating of 12ms.
The onboard sd card reader is pretty quick. Using SiSoft’s Sandra Flash Benchmark utility with a 128mb Sandisk SD card, I got file transfer rates (read speeds) a few percent higher than the benchmark data for other SD cards in the Sisoft database. Writes were a good bit slower. Like most flash readers, data transfer rates with small files were much less than large files, with read speeds ranging from 141kb/sec for 512b files (small text files), to 4700kb/sec for 256kb files (small to medium word documents, spreadsheets) to 7300 kb/sec for 2mb files (digital images, mp3 files, etc). Write speeds were much slower, typically about 20% of the read speeds for large files, with a maximum of about 1.5mb/sec.
The 24X CDRW/DVD combo drive included with my Inspiron 9200 is a Sony CRX830E, rated for 24X CD read, write and rewrite speeds, and 8X DVD read speeds. Though it supports packet writing (drag and drop burning), it does not support Mt. Rainier packet writing, which would allow for much faster formatting of cd’s. (I wish the Inspiron included a slot loading drive instead of the conventional slide out tray design.)
Using the freeware Digital audio extraction program CDDAE (www.cdspeed2000.com), I was able to extract 19 wav files from a music cd (Best of Martina Mcbride) containing 69 minutes of music (692mb) in 4 minutes and one second (for comparison, a good 48X or 52X cd writer would extract these files in about 2 minutes and 45 seconds). The average read speed was 17.3X, and the final read speed was 24X, confirming to the drive’s nameplate speed. Average cpu utilization was a low 5%. CDDAE verified that the tracks were extracted with 0% errors.
Additional tests with the Nero CD-DVD Speed benchmark program (also available at www.cdspeed2000.com) confirmed that this drives read and write performance were equal to its nameplate speeds. The drive is a CAV drive (Constant Angular Velocity), and at maximum, it runs at a constant 5000 rpm, with read speeds near the inside of a cd starting at 10X, increasing to 24X at the outer edge of the cd. CD-DVD Speed rated digital audio extraction quality as 10/10, confirming CDDAE’s errorless extraction measurements. DVD performance tests similarly confirmed the drive’s nameplate ratings. Most commercial DVD’s are dual layer, and this sony drive will read them with an average read speed of about 4.5X, typical results for read tests on a dual layer disk. When reading a single layer DVD-R disk containing 4.3gb of data that I burned, read speeds started at 3.4X at the inside edge of the disk, increasing to 8.3X at the outside edge, for an average read speed of 6.2X. I've only burned a few cd's, but this drive appears to handle burning well, requiring about 4 minutes to burn a full cdr.
Support
The warranty included in the base price is for 1 year. Longer terms are available. I was disappointed that a hard copy manual was not included. Other than the lack of a manual, I find Dell’s support to be pretty good.
Dell support has worked well for me in the past. (When a Dell monitor I owned started to fail, it was replaced quickly, and Dell paid to ship the old one back). The user forums on the Dell site are very active, and are a good source of information. I usually look here for help first, its a lot faster than trying to call Dell for help. I had a lot of problems with this particular order, as the initial shipment was lost by UPS. Dell didn’t make a second shipment for a little over two weeks, and by that time the rebate was no longer valid (its keys off the shipment date, not order date). I also changed the shipment destination from my parents house (it was to be a Christmas gift for my son while we were visiting) , where sales tax was to be charged, to my home in Louisiana, where sales tax was not applicable. I ended up spending at least 6 hours on the phone getting the replacement shipped, the rebate authorized, and the tax issue settled, but at least with Dell I was able to get the problems resolved.
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