HI all Techies,
Please congratulate me on getting my first laptop. Ha ha…
This is my first review on this forum & I will appreciate any questions or suggestions for improving this.
I received my Inspiron 6000 two days back after a long waiting period.
Order Date
14 May
Delivery Date
13 June
In between this period they started offering Rs. 3000/- discount.
(There was some problem in credit card payment but that took only 2 days.)
It was delivered by Safexpress.
I must say I was surprised at the packing. I was expecting foam and peanuts and bubble wrap and plastic airbags but it came in a box sitting inside another box and that's it.
Here's what I got, in a nutshell:
System: Intel Pentium M Processor 730 (1.60 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB)
Screen: 15.4" WXGA LCD Panel
GPU: 64MB ATI Mobility Radeon X300 Video Card
Memory: 512MB DDR2 SDRAM (2 DIMMs) 533MHz
HD: 80GB Hard Drive (Toshiba)
Network Card: Integrated 10/100 Network Card and Modem
Optical Drive: 8x CD/DVD Burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer writing capability(NEC)
Battery: 6 cell high capacity lithium ion primary battery (*65Whr)
Carry Case: Dell Deluxe leather Carrying Case
O/S: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition with SP2
Wireless Card: Intel Pro/Wireless 2200 Internal Wireless (802.11 B/G, 54mbps)
Secure Digital Card Reader/Writer. (I didn’t ask for)
This is my first laptop but I have used an IBM ThinkPad & a Toshiba (don’t remember the model). All I know is that it's fast and versatile and I am totally blown away at the all around speed of it. Construction is very nice, no rough edges, missing bits or crooked stickers. It’s very solid in feel of the case and construction. Everything works smoothly (DVD, Screen hinges, buttons) etc. Nothing about this laptop feels cheap or skimped on.
The screen is really great. The 15.4" resolution while a little hard to get used to at first is now incredible. Setting wallpaper of 1024X768 is a problem because of wide screen resolution. The image gets stretched but 1280X1024 images look just great. While some text is hard to read from a few feet, when it's on my lap or desk I have no trouble. I installed ‘Clear Type font’ from
www.microsoft.com & now the text look sharper. And the viewing angles are pretty decent too. Again, the higher end screens are probably better, but not knowing the difference (but I knew the price difference) for sure I'm impressed with what I have.
The sound is good; although it is laptop sound it's not tinny or hard to hear at all. Its speakers are way better than IBM & Toshiba. The Media buttons on the front of the unit are a nice touch for controlling volume and player options, and they light up with a nice blue backlight when pressed which is great when you’re in a low light level room & for show off also. DVD Movie playback was flawless; I tried both the Windows Media Player and the Dell Media Experience.
The NEC 8X DL burner works like a charm; I installed several programs & burnt CDs and DVDs without any problem. I couldn’t find any dual layer DVD+R media in market so I burnt 4.7GB (actual 4.3 GB) data DVD. It can write only DVD+R/RW format not –R but can read both.
The keyboard and touchpad I think are pretty good. The touchpad works great but I purchased an IBM Optical laptop mouse.
The USB ports are well placed making it easy to hook up lots of different devices (I have a digicam, usb dongle & mmc/sd card reader/writer). My system also came with a SD card reader which I didn’t order. When I asked the service engineer about it, he told me that it’s just an empty slot because it shares the chassis with whole Inspiron series, but afterwards I found that it works & works great too (faster than my USB card reader).
I am not going to use my lappy on the move very often. I never did a full battery test on this unit. But from what I can gather I should be good for at least 3to4 hours surfing the net & doing some MS Office jobs.
The first boot, of course, took little longer. The screen is totally amazing. There is almost no light leakage from this screen. The images look sharp & I just love its brightness. I can tell you that it is far better than IBM’s LCD.
I have read many people on various forums that DELL installs many useless bloatware but other than the drivers only Power DVD, Dell multimedia exp, Norton Internet security & Sonic Record Now were installed on my system. All of them are useful for me so I didn’t uninstall anything.
Then I downloaded some Benchmarks from
www.futuremark.com & ran them on my the unit & got the following scores
3dmark2005 - 968
3dmark2003 - 2514
3dmark2001 - 9500
PCmark2004 - 3910
I played some games like Act of War, NFS Underground 2, FIFA 2005, Half Life 2 & Doom 3 on it & it performed really well, especially in first three games with high details on 1024x768.
As I posted earlier that I don’t have any WiFi spot here hence I couldn’t explore it wireless capabilities. But I heard that it’s brilliant in that aspect also.
Let me tell you that the deluxe leather case supplied is really great & can cause envy of co passengers.
Now the AS support. Though my buying experience was not good, as I have mentioned earlier, I found that the AS support is good. A service engineer came to me all the way from Jaipur(300Kms) just for making sure that I got all things in good & proper working condition.
I must say this is a great laptop and a very good purchase. I really like the Great build, terrific screen, and awesome overall performance of this little machine. I highly recommend this laptop to anyone looking for a good workhorse of a machine.
Pros:
(+) Awesome performance
(+) Good VFM
(+) Longer battery life
(+) Brilliant 15.4� Ultra Sharp WXGA Screen
Cons:
(-) Too much of waiting time (obviously, nothing to do with laptop)
(-) Bit heavier (But its 15.4� screen).
I will post some pics of my system in few days.
Review:Dell Inspiron 6000
Linear Mode
