Dell Inspiron 6400

I have to start by saying that I am not well into the world of computers but I will describe my experiences of this model of notebook as I found them.

First of all, I am impressed with the widescreen and the screen display type. It is an excellent notebook when it comes to playing DVD's. The picture and sound are of high quality. I would rate sound quality 4/5 as it is the best I have experienced with a notebook however I do feel it could be improved.

I am also impressed with the speed of power-up on the notebook which is usually approximately 15seconds (i.e from pressing the power button until desktop is displayed and menu's accessible).

I am not very impressed with Vista updates on this machine. They seem to be incompatible with Dell machines. I say this because I have to continuously uninstall certain Microsoft Vista updates for the wireless connection to remain connected. Uninstalling the updates is the only solution I have found to solve this problem. I know that the problem is not caused by the wireless device itself as it runs perfectly for my housemates.

I really like the media shortcut buttons at the front of the notebook which include mute, volume control, pause, back and forward. These allow quick and easy access to functions of media player.

I tend to only use the notebook around the home so I feel that with my lifestyle, the weight of the notebook is not a problem however people who use it in transit may disagree.

I should also mention that the notebook came installed with a lot of programs which I felt irrelevant to my lifestyle such as Roxy DVD and numerous internet connection software, amongst others. These programs took up a quite lot of memory which resulted in my removing them which proved quite time consuming.

I like the touchpad feature of this model as it has added benefit that it can be locked when a mouse device is in use, something which I had found annoying on other notebooks while using Microsoft Word (The cursor was jumping all over the place and I seemed to be spending ages fixing writing which was in the wrong place).

I have noticed with this particular notebook that the screen flashes randomly. I am not yet sure of the cause of this and should say that this may be a flaw in my notebook and other people may not have experienced this.

Features which I found useful and relevant to me were: DVD rewriter, SD card slot, 4 USB ports, good battery life, 4 in-built speakers.

Overall, I feel that the Dell Inspiron 6400 was a good buy because it is fast with a good sized hard drive yet still reasonably priced.