Centrino here I come!
Written: May 30 '03
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Pros: price, lots of options, Built in wi-fi, battery life
Cons: It may take long to receive one depending on what you order with it.
The Bottom Line: The price is lower than some other centrino laptops. I say if you have the patience, buy it.
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| rjairam's Full Review: Dell Inspiron 500M (500msap) PC Notebook |
I needed a new laptop, as the one I had belonged to my employers and it's just a Pentium 3. They're not issuing laptops anymore, so I need one for my own personal use (not for work).
Since I already have a DELL desktop, I decided that it's only natural that I order a DELL laptop. I chose the 500m because I've been hearing good things about the battery life on centrino notebooks, as well as the wi-fi capability. The 500m and the 600m are the exact same laptops, except that the 600m has ATI graphics instead of integrated intel graphics on the 500m. I don't play games alot so this isn't terribly important to me.
My configuration was as follows:
Pentium M 1.3 GHZ with integrated Intel extreme graphics
XGA 14.1 display
20 GB hard drive
256MB RAM (which I later upgraded to 1 GB with memory from crucial)
MiniPCI 802.11b card
CD-RW/DVD combo
I got the first laptop relatively quick (5 days) and I was impressed with the performance. DVD's played smoothly and the screen was crisp and sharp. The CD-RW/DVD drive burned CD's nicely, but it only allowed 4x on some brands of CD's. This can be corrected by flashing the firmware on the CD-RW drive. The wi-fi worked nicely, and I was picking up more access points than when I was using my other laptop and the linksys card. They put the wi-fi antenna in the screen so you have more gain instead of a small antenna on a PCMCIA card. Battery life gave me on average a decent four hours, sometimes more or less depending on what you're doing.
Now here's the bad part. I decided that after a few days that I wanted more. I wanted the SXGA display and a RW/DVD reader/CD-RW drive. I called DELL and they said that they couldn't give me either as an upgrade component, that I'd have to order a new laptop with it. That was okay, so I got a CRA, took out my 1GB, put back the 256 MB of DELL memory and shipped back the laptop to DELL and ordered the new one with the SXGA screen, a RW/DVD reader/CD-RW combo drive and a 30GB hard drive.
It's been a few weeks and I'm still waiting. If you scan the DELL community forums, it's been indicated that the keepback is the SXGA LCD's. Your order status page doesn't tell you this, it just tells you that it's "in production". The phone system tells you it's in build. IMO, this is misleading. They should have the guts to tell customers up front that parts are backordered so that they can make a decision as to whether they're willing to wait. My ship date is June 6, so I'll probably have an update after then.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1696
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 14 inches
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
rjairam
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Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 1 member
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