Dell Inspiron 7000

Dell's latest update to its Inspiron range is very much in desktop replacement territory. The 7000 is too big and too heavy to appeal to frequent travellers who need to carry a machine over any distance. However, if you wanted a notebook instead of a desktop to save space at home or in the office, or if you need a presentation platform to go from the car park to the client's office, the Inspiron might be just the thing.

What you get is an all-in-one design with modularity in the form of an options bay, which can either hold a combo DVD-ROM/ floppy drive module or CD-ROM/floppy drive module or a second battery pack. Like the majority of all-in-one portables the Inspiron is thick (55mm) and in this instance has a footprint to match (328 « 262mm). This, combined with reasonably thick major mouldings and a good, solid lid surface to protect the screen, brings the weight up to 4.2kg.

The dimensions I've given are all maximums, and I should point out that the actual case footprint is slightly smaller than stated, as the front and side edges of the lid overhang the main body of the machine. This is the necessary consequence of the Inspiron's key selling point, namely its enormous 15in TFT screen. Without the outsized lid, a panel with a diagonal this large simply wouldn't fit.

The Inspiron is equipped with everything you'd expect from a full-sized portable, including an expansion bus for the Dell port replicator option, a USB port, a 4Mbits/sec infrared serial port, an S-video TV output (with a composite adaptor cable), and two Type II PC Card expansion slots. These support PC Card 32 (Cardbus) and you get Zoomed Video on the lower slot.

Audio is provided by two 0.5W speakers under the front part of the keyboard and an ESS Maestro-II sound chip with 3D surround sound and a hardware wavetable. The speakers were quite loud, and the sound had more body to it than you often get from a notebook, although it could have done with more definition at higher frequencies.

The keyboard has been laid out to take full advantage of the available space. The main alphanumeric pad spans almost the full width of the case, with the editing and cursor keys displaced above and below it. This provides an almost desktop-equivalent amount of space, so you get a big spacebar and big Enter, Backspace and Shift keys, and the feel is roomy and comfortable. Fast, accurate typing is much easier on this machine than on many notebooks.

The encouraging keyboard ergonomics are supplemented by the screen, which still operates in XGA resolution but with the enhanced readability offered by such a large diagonal. You'll adapt quickly to the Inspiron, especially if you plug in a desktop mouse.

The image is reasonably bright, with plenty of simultaneous colour on offer thanks to undithered 18-bit colour support, although you'd need to go to an external monitor to make full use of the 8Mb of video memory supplied as standard. While many notebooks still come with PCI bus graphics as standard, the Inspiron's ATi Rage LT Pro chip delivers fast 3D graphics on the AGP bus.

Anyone wanting to make intensive use of motion video, say, for training or presentation purposes, might find this, along with the DVD-ROM drive, extra video RAM, external TV connector and integrated DVD/MPEG-II decoder, an attractive set of functional enhancements.

Power management is handled by Windows 98 via the Power Management Properties dialog box, and you should get around three hours of continuous light use out of a healthy battery, with the option to double running time by fitting a second pack using the options bay.