Excellent Portable Laptop
Written: Dec 11 '04
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Pros: lightwieight,solid 7 hours of battery life. Excellent Screen
Cons: Cheesy color, 1 PCMCIA slot, No single function audio controls
The Bottom Line: Solid unit. Works well. Excellent price. Best screen
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| Wybnormal's Full Review: Dell Inspiron 700m PC Notebook |
As a road warrior vet (My first "laptop" weighed 15lbs) I can really appriciate the lightwieght Dell 700m laptop. I was concerned about the 12 inch screen and the 1280 screen resolution. But, even with my old eyes, I find the screen very easy to use and the LCD is one of the brightest I've seen in the small laptops.
The screen is not a normal screen, it is more like a wide screen which gives alot of real estate for applications but not the hight that causes so much heartache on plane flights when the idiot in front slams their seat back.
The keyboard is about a 2/3 sized keyboard but still easy enought to touch type on as I do as an author. The keys have a very good tactile feel to to them, not soft but muted with a solid feel. Unlike 700m's bigger brothers, the keyboard does not flex as one starts typing hard.
I upgraded mine to 512meg of ram and a 60gig drive along with the extra life battery. I did not upgrade the DVD/CD to a DVD burner but kept the CD burner with the DVD player. This laptop really does not have the horsepower to be burning DVD so why waste the money?
The laptop has two USB2 ports and 1 Firewire port. A few more would have been nice but they do fine. A nice feature is the builtin SD Flash reader. Wile I use compact flash for my cameras, the SD is a greta way to move files from system to system and to the PDA so I find it very useful. The downside is you give up one PCMCIA slot to get the reader. That leaves a single PCMCIA slot.
The wireless is almost always the weak link on many laptops but the Dell uses a decent INtel/Proset chipset which is both 11 and 54Mbps compatible. (802.11b and 802.11G) The only issue I had was Windows XP Pro still can not manage wireless well so I had to shift over to the Intel utility to manage the card. Once I did that, it has been flawless.
I dislike the cheesy white band around the laptop perimeter and the silver. I prefer a nice black on my laptops but I am willing to live with it since the Dell works so well.
Just as a point of reference, my other three choices were an IBM X40, Sony and an Apple G4 powerbook. The Dell was several hundred cheaper then the IBM and with more disk and memory. The Sony had more features but just did not seem build as solid. The Apple is a very nice machine but the screen just did not measure up compared to the Dell.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1400.00
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 12 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
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Epinions.com ID:
Wybnormal
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Member: Mike
Location: Orange CA
Reviews written: 27
Trusted by: 3 members
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