Dell Inspiron 3700 C466GT

The Mobile Celeron processor has been one of Intel's star products in recent months, and Dell has taken advantage of its fastest incarnation in this version of the new Inspiron 3700, which replaces the Inspiron 3500. The resulting combination is the Inspiron 3700 C466GT, here generously supported by 128Mb of fast PC100 SDRAM, a 10Gb hard disk and DVD-ROM.

Dell has restyled the machine, introducing more curves and an anti-slip texture to areas of the surface mouldings. It also offers a version with a tasteful dark blue body top and screen surround. This won't appeal to everyone, but it's more interesting than the basic charcoal grey.

The 3700 weighs only 3kg with its floppy drive installed, or 3.1kg with the DVD-ROM drive in the multipurpose bay. Having said that, some of the weight savings have clearly been achieved by using thin mouldings for the case and lid surface, although these remain rigid. The lid is also quite thick, so when it does yield under pressure the screen below should remain out of harm's way. Overall though, the machine doesn't have the feel of solid engineering that you get from the best-made portables.

There's a single multipurpose bay capable of holding the floppy or DVD-ROM drives supplied with the notebook, or options including an LS-120 SuperDisk and a second hard disk. To make life easier there's a Windows utility that allows you to hot-swap drive modules and a cable to connect the floppy drive to the parallel port when the bay is full.

The IBM Travelstar hard disk is removable and encased to protect against static damage, with a security screw to hold it firmly in place. Memory expansion is via a pair of SODIMM sockets readily accessible under a plate in the base, one of which is free for future upgrades.

The machine has an expansion bus for use with a docking station or port replicator, and among the usual ports on the notebook itself are some useful extras, most notably an S-Video output for connection to a TV set, which could be useful for presentations. Alternatively, you might want to use the Inspiron's DVD-ROM drive and PC Card hardware MPEG-2 decoder as a movie player at home. The latter is a slightly surprising inclusion for Dell, but a very welcome one, especially as there doesn't appear to be any notable increase in the overall price.

On the flip side, I'd expect a modem but this isn't included as standard. The final ingredients are a copy of Microsoft Office 2000 SBE, which is always worth having, and a one-year Europe-wide, collect-and-return warranty.

Unlike some of Dell's notebooks, the Inspiron 3700 didn't impress when it came to battery life, with a typical running time of about two hours. If this isn't enough for you, an extra battery pack costs £79 and slots into the multipurpose bay to double up the time.

I've always liked Dell's notebook keyboards, but, if anything, the one fitted to the new Inspiron is an improvement. The characteristic size and spacious layout has been preserved, along with the crucial trio of large spacebar, Enter and backspace keys, so typing is easy and comfortable. The area of improvement is in the action, which is firmer and more positive, with deeper key travel. Dell has also fitted both a touchpad and a trackpoint.

The ergonomics are rounded off by a 14.1in TFT screen. This runs in the usual XGA resolution and is well-illuminated by its backlight, which is almost as important as the size of the panel itself. Graphics are catered for internally by an AGP bus ATi Rage Mobility-M1 chipset with a generous 8Mb of local memory, so neither speed nor colour depth are issues as far as 2D work is concerned. Despite ATi's best efforts though, these chipsets don't confer anything like desktop-equivalent 3D acceleration.