I recently ordered a Dell 8000 Inspiron, with the 1400x1050 screen, GeForce2Go video card, DVD drive, integrated network and modem, 256 Mb of RAM, a 20 Gb hard drive, and a 900 Mhz Pentium III CPU.

I had planned to use this machine to pass time on long trips, and in fact I took it with me to Europe. I ended up returning it for the reasons I will explain below.

First of all, the performance of this machine is simply outrageous. This was my first laptop, and I had always assumed that laptops were much slower than desktops because of the engineering tradeoffs required in making such a machine. Not this laptop.

The first thing I did was play some 3D shooters on it. To my great surprise, Serious Sam ran silky-smooth at 1280x1024, which many older desktops cannot even do. I attribute this great speed to the GeForce2Go video card. Likewise, applications and other software all performed very quickly. Still, Windows ME takes quite a while to boot up.

This performance comes at a price. The batteries did not seem to last that long. I actually put in two batteries (the DVD drive is fixed), and I think I got around 4 or 5 hours out of that configuration (sorry I didn't do any extensive testing). However, with 2 of the larger batteries the unit weighs 9 pounds, I weighed it on the postal scale I have at work.

The 1400x1050 screen is beautiful, and I noticed no dead pixels. Since very few games play at 1400x1050, I got to see how well stuff looks at non-native resolutions. Text doesn't look as good, it has a slighly "defocused" look to it, but there is no real reason not to run the desktop at a non-native resolution for that purpose. For everything else (games, graphics, etc.), non-native resolutions looked just fine.

When I took the unit on the plane (in economy class) I noticed that I could barely use the system if the person in front of me put their seat back. I'm thin, but I imagine if you were overweight it would be even more difficult, because I ended up with the bottom of the laptop jabbed into my stomach on occasions.

I had some problems with the system: Only 2 out of 8 DVDs I tested worked. The others would display the following annoying problem: Every few seconds, sometimes in the title sequence of a DVD, sometimes in the movie itself, the screen would turn dark green, quickly flash the PowerDVD logo, and go back to the movie. Needless to say, this made watching those DVDs pretty darn impossible.

Also, initially when shutting down the system, it would just sit there (I had Windows ME) forever, and I would have to turn off the power, and Windows would complain and run a diskscan on bootup. Also, I had some problem with the suspend mode (when you close the lid the machine suspends itself). At first it didn't seem to work, and then later it worked fine. I was playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3, and I would close the lid, the machine would suspend, and then when I opened the lid the game would continue, but all the sound would stop.

Overall, I was very impressed with the machine. The screen image looks great, the performance is outstanding, and the price is decent.

I would recommend this system as a desktop replacement, but it's too bulky to carry around. I tried and I have already ordered an Inspiron 4000 instead. With Windows 2000 instead of Windows ME.

One word of advice: Dell offers a 30 day return policy, which I used to return my 8000 after I realized it was too heavy to use as a portable. However, the 30 days starts when they ship it to you, not when you get it, AND you must contact only their returns department when you want to return the unit. Contacting your salesperson and saying you want to return the unit is not good enough. The unit took 1 week to get to me, so I only had 3 weeks to return it, I thought I would have 4 weeks to try it, and it took 4 calls to customer returns to finally return the unit. It was a very stressful process for me, since it is quite an expensive item and I would probably take a $750 hit trying to sell it on eBay. So, if you are not 100% sure you want it, and you think you might want to take advantage of Dell's 30 day return policy, BE VERY SURE you keep VERY CAREFUL track of how many days you have left to return it. I was only 2 days over according to their rules and it was a Herculean task to return the system, even though I kept telling them I was just going to buy a 4000 to replace it.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 3000
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 801-900
Screen Size: 15
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20