Great Body Building Tool!
Written: Aug 27 '01
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Pros: High-resolution display; amazing 3D performance; descent price.
Cons: Heavy and poor battery life.
The Bottom Line: Since I do not carry my laptop every where I go, this is a great laptop. It's heavy, but good.
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| WildBillm's Full Review: Dell Inspiron 8000 Series |
This is one of the heaviest laptops on the market weighing in at 7.9 pounds, but then again do you really go hiking with your laptop? If so, you may want to choose a different one. If your hike usually consists of walking from the parking garage to your office building, the weight may not be an issue for you.
Dell Inspirion 8000 is fairly bulky. It is not so bulky that you would have to hire a bellhop to carry your bags, but it is bulky non the less. The design and look is very pleasing, and you could also get the “QuickSnap Color Palm Rest” for an additional $19 to give your laptop some personality. I opted to save our company the $19, or was I not able to justify the colored palm rests compared to the default black ones? I don’t remember.
Here is the Layout of the Review:
Why I Chose Dell?
Specifications
Likes and Dislikes
Conclusion
Why I Chose Dell?
Let me tell you how I came about getting this laptop. I just started working for the Louisiana Supreme Court as a Unix Administrator in May. They immediately bought me a new Dell Dimension 4100 1GHz desktop (Review Coming Soon). Since there is some occasional remote administration I have to do, I was told I would be getting a laptop as well. About a month ago, I was given the ok to go to Dell’s website and pick out a laptop. Since I was picking it out, I wasn’t going to buy a cheap laptop that would need replacing in 6 months. So I went to Dell’s website and went for not quite the top of the line 1GHz and I chose the 900 MHz. Dell labels this laptop the “Multimedia mobile replacement”. (See specs below). And multimedia is what this laptop was made for. If I had my free reign on choosing any laptop I wanted, I believe I would go with the Toshiba 2805-S402 because of the subwoofer system, lighter weight. However, I would be giving up the 32mb video card for a 16mb. So it would be a tough decision.
Specifications
PIII 900 MHz
Windows ME
15" SuperXGA+TFT Display
ATI Mobility video card with 32MB of memory
128MB Single DIMM so we could add another 256 if necessary
2X PCMCIA slots
2X USB ports
20GB ATA 100 Hard Drive
8X DVD-ROM Drive(can also use CDs)
2X Li-ION battery
Xircom 10/100 Ethernet II, PC Card
Internal 56K WinModem
MS Office 2002 XP
WinDVD
Norton Antivirus 2001
Weight = 7.9 pounds (around 9lbs counting the power supply and extra battery)
$2563.99
Likes and Dislikes
There are a good number of features that this laptop has. And really only a few bad ones, so you need to decide which features mean more to you.
Likes
Likes - Graphics and Graphics Card
The graphics on this laptop are pretty phenomenal. Not very many laptops offer 32mb Video Ram yet, so that is another plus for this one. 3D Graphics are crisp with vibrant colors. Watching DVD Movies on this laptop are pretty nice too. I have seen these laptops with both the ATI Mobility video card with 32MB VRAM and the Nvidia GeForce2 Go with 32MB VRAM. My laptop has the ATI card. The GeForce outperforms the ATI, but not by much. Both these cards are great performers. Here are the resolution specs for the 2:
GeForce2 ATI
LCD Resolution
2048x1536 1600x1200
Monitor Resolution (If you connect an external monitor up)
2048x1536 1600 x1200
at 75Hz at 75Hz
Likes – Choice of pointing devices
The thing I really like is this laptop gives you the choice of using either the joystick type pointing device or the touch pad. How do they do that? They put both on the laptop and you can use either. So you are not forced to use the touch pad if you are a joystick person like me.
Dislikes
Dislikes - Battery Life
The battery life for this notebook is not very good. It is one of the poorest compared to other notebooks in it’s class. With moderate use and the system set to battery-optimized mode, I was only able to use the laptop for about 2 hours and 30 minutes before reaching the “Battery Critically Low” status. So if you are going to get this laptop, you may want to consider getting a second battery like I did (around $98). It will give you roughly 4-5 hours of use with both batteries in the system. If you plan on watching DVDs, I would definitely get a second battery because DVD movie watching is pretty battery intensive.
Dislikes – DVD Drive Design
Just to clarify here, the DVD drive performs really nice. I have yet to have a skip or pause after watching about 3 DVD movies. However, the design of the DVD drive itself is kind of flimsy. When you open the drive, it opens with no problems. When you try to close the drive, because of the design you may experience the drive not closing very smoothly. The faceplate of the drive tends to catch the top of the drive bay when you try and close it. I have to push the drive faceplate down slightly when closing so that it doesn’t get caught in the drive bay. I hope the explanation wasn’t too confusing.
Conclusion
The laptop is really nice and I like the fact that you can have 2 batteries in it at the same time while watching a DVD like the Godfather series coming out soon. There are other laptops out there you can get longer battery life and less weight, but not 32mb video ram so that is why I gave it 4 stars. If you want to build muscle mass while taking the stairs to your 15th floor office, then you may want to look closely at this baby.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): $2563.99
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 801-900
Screen Size: 15
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
WildBillm
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 - Top 1000 |
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Member: Bill Mounsey
Location: Slidell, LA
Reviews written: 57
Trusted by: 43 members
About Me:
Unix Administrator in Louisiana. Love college basketball, football, baseball and computers.
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