Product Reviews

A£1,399 price tag already seems cheap for a notebook like the Dell Inspiron 2650, but you don't even have to pay that much if you don't want to. The review machine came kitted out with several extras, including an additional 128Mb of RAM, Ethernet adaptor, Microsoft Office XP Small Business Edition rather than Works 6, a large screen and 30Gb hard disk - hardly budget-conscious specifications.

Go for the 1.4GHz Pentium 4-M version with 128Mb of RAM, a 20Gb hard disk, a 14.1in screen and a plain CD-ROM and you can shave £400 off the ticket, leaving you with just £999 to pay. I mention this because the Inspiron 2650 is essentially meant to be a cheaper alternative to the 4100 and 8200 Inspirons, which offer more ports and a modular architecture as well as beefier specifications as standard.

With this in mind, it's easy to see where Dell is coming from. The overall design has been kept relatively simple, doubtless to keep on top of the cost, but Dell has tried not to take too much away in the process. The floppy and optical drives are both internal, and fixed rather than modular, but the model we reviewed dodged any potential limitation by featuring a DVD/CD-RW combo drive.

The port count has been trimmed back to a basic set of two USB ports, plus parallel, VGA and a PS/2 connector for an external mouse or keyboard. Extras such as TV-out and IEEE-1394 have been omitted along with the serial port, and it may be worth noting that this model doesn't have an expansion bus for use with a port replicator either.

I also noticed that the customary pair of PC Card slots has dropped down to just one Type II slot, but there's a plausible justification for this. The machine has both an internal V.92 modem and a 10/100BaseTX Ethernet adaptor already, so a single PC Card slot is all it needs.

At 3.65kg, it's not light, so think carefully before buying the Inspiron 2650 if you're planning on travelling with it. The other side of this coin is that it's reassuringly robust, with a dense, durable feel to the body. Similarly, the lid, while made of plastic, is thick enough and sufficiently

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reinforced by the moulding to provide a reasonable degree of protection to the screen.

Here again, Dell has gone for a sensible compromise between cost and capability. The panel has a 15in diagonal, but operates in a standard 1,024 x 768 resolution rather than one of the extra high-resolution modes Dell uses for some of its more costly notebooks. The results are pleasing, with the wide diagonal making text larger and more readable, while the bright, high-contrast panel is also relatively easy on the eye.

The spirit of intelligent compromise extends to the graphics subsystem, which proved to be an Nvidia GeForce2 Go fitted with 16Mb of DDR memory. This struggled with the 32-bit XGA 3DMark2001 SE benchmark, which halted with an 'out of memory' error, but did well enough in 16-bit colour with a final score of 2,058. The implication is clear enough: you've got stacks of power for 2D graphics and enough for casual recreation, as long as you don't ask too much.

In general 2D terms, the Inspiron is a capable machine, thanks to the raw energy of the 1.6GHz Pentium 4-M under the hood. The extra memory on the review sample also helped, and you should find a system configured like this can cope with any normal task. An overall benchmark result of 0.74 confirms this (with a desktop 2GHz Pentium 4 scoring 1) and, while not up there with the latest desktops, it's on a par with expectations for a 1.6GHz chip.

The other aspect of the Pentium 4-M is its ability to conserve power, but a picture is emerging that's not especially favourable in this respect. Our intensive rundown test expired after 84 minutes, which again suggests that the Pentium 4-M doesn't cope as well as the Pentium III-M when it comes to squeezing out the power over a period of vigorous use.

Off the shelf, the Inspiron has a one-year, European collect-and-return warranty. with a fairly leisurely six-day turnaround period. You can bump this up to three years' cover for an extra £145, or you can opt for a more serious three-year international, next-day, on-site warranty instead. This comes in at £199 on top of the basic price of the system.

The choice of home- and business-orientated extended warranties is a convenient way to round the package off and underlines the carefully considered nature of the Inspiron in general. The machine itself is a sound proposition, so long as its size and weight aren't a problem and you don't have a specific requirement for a serial port, TV-out or port replicator. The thing to watch out for is the way the price starts to go up if you begin specifying a few tempting extras, in which case it's better to opt for a more flexible chassis like the Inspiron 8200.