Dell Inspiron 6400

...was wrong.

Dell just happened to have some decent offers on at the time I was looking for a laptop. Their website has offers on all the time, but some months are a lot better than others and this just happened to be one of those months.

We use Dell laptops at work and as the head of IT services it's normally me that decides what kit we get and on the configurations, so I had an idea of what I was looking for since we ...
.../> I configured my Dell Inspiron 6400 as follows (for those techy types out there)

Base Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Processor T2060(1.6GHz/533MHz/1MB)
Microsoft Operating System Genuine Windows Vista™ Ultimate - English
Memory 2048MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM (2x1024)
Video Card 256MB ATI® Mobility™ Radeon® X1400 HyperMemory™ graphics card
Hard Drive 120GB (5,400rpm) Hard Drive
Modem 56.6k ... more

I wanted a new laptop. My desktop PC was great, but we decided to change the 3rd bedroom back to a bedroom and so the desktop had to go. The problem was that my desktop PC was a high spec PC and I thought I'd have to spend a hell of a lot to even come close to it's spec in a laptop. Luckily I was wrong.

Dell just happened to have some decent offers on at the time I was looking for a laptop. Their website has offers on all the time, but some months are a lot better than others and this just happened to be one of those months.

We use Dell laptops at work and as the head of IT services it's normally me that decides what kit we get and on the configurations, so I had an idea of what I was looking for since we bought similar laptops for our sales team recently.

I configured my Dell Inspiron 6400 as follows (for those techy types out there)

Base Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Processor T2060(1.6GHz/533MHz/1MB)
Microsoft Operating System Genuine Windows Vista™ Ultimate - English
Memory 2048MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM (2x1024)
Video Card 256MB ATI® Mobility™ Radeon® X1400 HyperMemory™ graphics card
Hard Drive 120GB (5,400rpm) Hard Drive
Modem 56.6k V.92 Capable Internal Modem & Adapter
CD/DVD Drives Fixed Internal 8X DVD+/-RW Drive including software
Wireless Local Area Networking Dell Wireless 1390 802.11b/g 54Mbps Mini-PCI Wireless Card,
Bluetooth Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth 2.0 Module (up to 3Mbps) with Enhanced Data Rate, for

Vista
Primary Battery 6 Cell, 53Whr Lithium Ion Primary Battery
LCD 15.4" Wide Screen WXGA (1280 x 800) Display with TrueLife™

The OS that came on the laptop was Vista Home Premium, but I replaced with with my own licence for Vista Ultimate, although Home Premium is perfect for most home users.

The laptop came with 1 gig of ram with the option to upgrade it to 2 gig, but Dell's prices were high on that. Instead I bought the laptop with 1 gig of ram and ordered a 2 gig upgrade from another online supplier, saving myself nearly £100. The difference in performance going from 1 gig to 2 gig is extremely noticable as expected.

So how does it perform?

The CPU gets a higher Vista performance rating than my old Intel Pentium 4 3.6 CPU on my old desktop and in actual use seems to perform slightly better. Don't let the 1.6GHz put you off, this is dual core so almsot like having 2 CPUs instead of one.

The graphics card is a hell of a lot better than the onboard or cheaper graphics cards I've seen in laptops in the past. Although it's a 256Mb card, it's Hypermemory. This means that the card actually has 128Mb of it's own memory and can take another 128Mb from your system memory should it need it to make up the 256Mb. If you have 1 or 2 gig of ram, this isn't a problem. I've tested with the odd game (although I'm not really a gamer) and it handles them perfectly. As for videos, photos and other graphics, I've not had any problems as of yet and Vista's Aero theme runs totally smoothly.

The DVD writer seems slightly slower than what I'm used to, but this isn't a massive problem. If you configure one of these laptops, don't settle for anything less than a DVD rewriter, the combo drives etc. are pants.

The laptop comes with a built in wireless network adapter. Most laptops do these days and it's very convinient. This seems very sensitive on my 6400 and I'm getting better signal strengths and speeds than I did with older Dell laptops. The card I opted for supports both B & G networks as most do, although there's an option for N if you want to folk out the extra.

I paid an extra £20 for Bluetooth capability and it's a great feature. Instead of messing about with a USB device, the Bluetooth is built in to the laptop and activates at a click of a button. You can use this with Bluetooth enabled hardware such as keyboards, mice, headphones, mobilephones etc. and it's very easy to use with excellent range and speed.

I paired my mobile phone with my laptop and at the click of a button can transfer all my contacts to my PC to back them up or synchronise my calendars etc. which is very handy. It's also a great feature to use to pull photos or videos from your camera phone without software or cables and if you wish to use the mobile as a modem on the move you can do that too.

Battery life isn't bad. I opted for the 6 cell battery which is the middle option of the 3 available currently. I wish in some ways I'd gone for the 9 though as using the laptop with the wireless network, bluetooth and other demmanding features means I get about 2 hours from my 6 cell battery. Having said that, it's cheaper to buy official Dell batteries from other suppliers instead of Dell. One tip, if you do buy another battery, avoid the 3rd party types, make sure it's an original Dell or you'll void your warranty!

As a desktop replacement the laptop is great. Not once have I missed my desktop PC. The 6400 performance is excellent for my needs which include the usual internet, email, documents, occasional gaming, watching DVDs, downloads, software development, video editing etc. and not once have I come against a problem with resources. It's coping with everything I chuck at it and doing it extremely quickly and smoothly.

The build quality is good on everything except the 2 touchpad buttons which feel a little flimsy. I've not had problems with them as of yet, but they don't fill me with confidence.

The speakers are great, nice and loud if required.

The extra controls on the bottom are nice and actually useful, although the lack of built in microphone is dissapointing.

If you want to use the laptop to just watch a film you can press the MediaDirect button and instead of booting in to Windows the laptop will boot to a Media OS which is quicker to start up and allow you to watch films or listen to music. I removed this feature from my laptop as it took an extra 2 gig of hard drive space in a hidden partition that was more useful to me than the MediaDirect feature was.

The laptop is certainly quiet. I've only heard the fan a few times and even then it's not loud at all. The hard drive and other components are very quiet, even when working hard.

There's a decent card reader to the side of the laptop which is very handy. There are also several USB ports, a monitor port, TV out, firewire, ethernet, modem, sound and PCMCIA Express port (if you have PCMCIA cards forget them, the won't fit in the new slots).

I upgraded my monitor to Truebright. The standard monitor looks fine, but the Truebright monitor is certainly worth the extra £20. It adds a nice shiny finish to the outer part of the monitor and seems to show the display a lot more crisp and better colours. The one downside to this is that if used in direct sunlight it can be hard to see the display properly, but I was able to use mine in the garden this weekend without any problems. Some people prefer the old type of display, for comparing the two side by side at work there's no question for me, Truebright is my favourite.

The bundled software is a nightmare. I understand that if Dell didn't include this stuff then the price of their kit would be higher, but even so it's a pain. The first thing I recommend you do is remove all the crap that comes with this laptop. There is lots of ISP software, Mircosoft Works (not as good as office), McAfee (YUK! This is a performance killer, replace with NOD32 for anti virus and take your pick from Outpost, Kerio or Sygate firewalls and you'll see a massive performance increase) and other crap that's preloaded. It will take about 30 minutes to shift the lot, but it's well worth doing as you'll get more disk space and should see quite a performance increase with less software that you don't actually use running.

To sum it all up, I'm extremely happy with my Inspiron 6400. It came in with the extras at under £600 thanks to the offers and the shopping around for the upgrades and fitting them myself. It out performs my desktop PC that I replaced which itself was a high spec PC. It's a decent size and a joy to use. The colour may be nice in black, but maybe the white will grow on me.

I recommend anyone looking for a decent laptop to certainly take a look at this. You get performance without the price tag and if configured right it should last you a good while. I considered a Sony before this, but price for price the Dell easily wins (plus a lot of our Sonys in the office have fallen apart!)

Top marks from me.  

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