Product Reviews

A few years ago the list of things that needed improving in notebooks at that time was lengthy: performance, level of specification, battery life, keyboard design, everything about the screen and so on. Now, after a very good run by the world's notebook engineers, it's getting harder to pick up a decent notebook and itemise the areas where it could be improved. Short of breakthroughs in fundamental areas like power consumption, heat emission and battery technology, the kind of improvements you'll get in the short term are going to be incremental and the new Dell Inspiron 5000e G750VT illustrates this perfectly.

The differences between the Inspiron 5000e G750VT and the Inspiron 5000 650LT (reviewed issue 66, p155) are internal. To start with, you now get a faster processor in the form of a Pentium III with SpeedStep technology running at 750MHz. The amount of memory supplied is still 128Mb, but the size of the hard disk has increased from 12Gb to 30Gb. The graphics chipset has also received a considerable nudge up the spec ladder and now has 16Mb of local memory rather than 8Mb.

The 15in panel diagonal may be the limit given the footprint of the machine itself, but the native resolution has been boosted from the original XGA to a super-high SXGA+ rating. This translates in dots and lines to 1,400 x 1,050. There's also support for extended desktops, or an external UXGA resolution display simultaneously.

If you haven't handled an Inspiron before, the first impression is one of solidity, thanks to the use of thick mouldings throughout. This makes the case fairly rigid and avoids that worrying 'model aircraft' feel of some notebooks. And while the lid surface isn't metal, it's still strong enough to provide a fair degree of protection to the screen

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when you're travelling.

The front edge of the machine houses the various bays: one for the battery, one for the removable drive (in this case an eight-speed Toshiba DVD-ROM) and one for the 30Gb removable IBM Travelstar hard disk. The main bay can be used for a selection of options, such as CD-RW or an LS-120 SuperDisk, or it can hold a second battery pack. It's worth noting that this machine already weighs a fair bit, so fitting another heavy battery will make it quite an armful.

As you'd expect for a desktop replacement, the Inspiron has an expansion bus for use with a docking station. All other extras are in place too, including USB and TV-out ports, as well as an integrated V.90 fax/modem. A more substantial addition is the copy of Microsoft Works Suite 2000 which is included in the price.

Dell's engineers understand the importance of having a good keyboard on a notebook. The pad takes full advantage of the space available to it and the result is something that compares well to a desktop keyboard in terms of layout, the relative sizes of the keys and, more importantly, in overall usability. It's all rounded off by a reasonably solid baseplate, which injects just the right note of quality to the overall feel of the machine.

The screen's unusually high resolution delivers a huge Windows workspace, but of course screen objects are fairly small as a result. Nevertheless, the crispness of the TFT and the sensitive, responsive mouse pad ensure that you can read text and hit screen buttons without straining yourself. On the whole, this screen is preferable to a simple 15in XGA version.

Performance under Windows 2000 is stunning, returning the best notebook result seen by far with a score of 2.26. There's no doubt that for now this is the kind of platform which will suit someone wanting the best from a portable. The improved ATi Rage Mobility-128 graphics chipset can drive the screen in 32-bit colour at its maximum resolution and, taken as a whole, there's more punch and more big numbers to play with here than you'd get from many business desktops.

Better still, the Inspiron's battery pack kept going for almost three hours of uninterrupted use, which tops off the impressive list of good things about this machine and ensures that it remains one of the best, realistically priced power notebooks on the market.