I've held back on buying my own laptop for a long time now, relying instead on my multiple tower systems at home and using an employer-supplied "laptop" on business trips. I got so frustrated with my company laptop that I quit carrying it. "Give me an Etch-a-Sketch and some colored pencils and I can do the same thing" is the feeling I had.

While on a recent plane flight, there was a crying child on board adding to the inconvenience of being held on the runway for takeoff. Another passenger across the aisle from me, calmly took out his laptop, put on some headphones and began to watch a movie. That's what got me looking for a REAL laptop.

To make a long story short, I ended up getting a Dell Inspiron 5000e configured with the 15" Ultra-XGA display, 800mhz Pentium 3, 256mb of RAM, a 20gb hard drive, 8x DVD player and Xircom RealPort 10/100 Ethernet/v.90 modem.

The one thing that really sticks out on my Inspiron is the display. The Ultra-XGA (1600x1200) has got to been seen. It is worth the extra cost. It is razor-sharp! Brightness is excellent and can be controlled up or down several increments. Viewing DVD's is a joy as well due to the overall size of the display. Colors are bright and vibrant. Like most LCD screens though, bright, direct lighting tends to wash out the display.

The 20gb hard drive I received with the laptop was a Fujitsu unit. It had a constant whine to it while in operation. It was especially noticeable in quiet environments. I contacted Dell's technical support about it and they immediately sent me a replacement unit, an IBM Travelstar. The new drive did the trick. Quiet as a mouse now!

I chose the 800mhz processor instead of the 850 simply because the difference in performance was not worth the $299 to go for the faster one. The processor in the unit does get quite warm as I found out while using the laptop in my lap while wearing shorts. Ouch!

The CD/DVD ROM drive works very well in both roles. Loading applications is accomplished with a minimum of noise and vibration. The CD-ROM portion functions at a 24x speed. DVD playback is smooth with no evidence of artifacting on the screen. Digital audio extraction does not seem to work with
this drive so if you're planning on ripping some CD's to MP3's with your laptop, you may be out of luck here.

Battery life on this unit is excellent coming close to 3 hours per battery under normal use. You can remove the DVD drive and add a second battery to double your run time. The Inspiron uses the batteries one at a time instead of drawing from both at once so one you're at 50% power with 2
batteries, you know one of your batteries still has a full charge. The batteries also have a 5-step charge indicator on their sides that you can activate with a button to see the current charge status.

For expansion, the Inspiron has 2 PCMCIA card slots, a USB port, PS/2 mouse/keyboard port, docking station port, serial, parallel, VGA, and an S-Video port. Dell also includes an S-Video to composite adapter as well. Additionally, I opted to get the Xircom combination 10/100 ethernet and V.90 modem. This deleted the built-in modem that would normally come with the laptop. The Xircom works like a champ with the modem connecting at high speeds and the NIC portion doing it's job. The fact that the Xircom has actual RJ ports on it is nice... no more fooling around with adapters and dongles to make connections. The downside is that its size takes up both my PC card slots. This is not such a big deal since I only use this one card on a regular basis. I also use a wireless PC card but I would remove it when commuting because it sticks out about 2 inches from the chassis and would prevent me from carrying my laptop in a bag.

I have been very pleased with my purchase so far. This is my first Dell purchase and will likely not be my last. My only real gripe is that the lead time to actually GET my laptop was over a month. That's a long time to wait for a new toy... I mean office machine.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 3750
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 701-800
Screen Size: 15
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20