Best in class
Written: Nov 06 '01
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Pros: Ultimate desktop replacement system at an affordable price
Cons: Big and heavy
The Bottom Line: If you can deal with the size and weight... this is the best system to buy for the money! Leading edge technology and a great desktop replacement system.
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| erick's Full Review: Dell Inspiron 8100 Series |
I've read many reviews about the Dell Inspiron 8100 on the Net and it seems that there are common complaints running through all of them which I will address first off to get them out of the way.
1) Size and Weight:
This is a desktop replacement system. That means that it will be BIG and HEAVY and probably not have very good battery life. But... if you plan to keep this unit plugged in while working on it and not moving it around too much... you can't get much better than this at this price. In my 'e'pinion, most people buy this notebook thinking it's going to be some thin and light machine that they are used to seeing at the local computer store -- look at the SPECS! If you are ordering a notebook with a 15" screen, 3 internal drives and a near-desktop size style keyboard... you shouldn't expect it to be 1" thick and weighing less than 5 pounds. But, you can expect a notebook with near-desktop speed that currently outperforms most others in this price range.
2) Service and Support:
Everyone has their nightmare stories. But I think everyone can attest to the fact that Dell is not the only company that has these problems. There isn't a notebook company out there that doesn't have someone saying something bad about their phone experience with technical support. I have been on hold for over 5 minutes and I have talked to people who don't seem to know what they are talking about... but I've experienced that with everyone -- the phone company, my doctor.. etc. All I can say is that please read the other reviews with a grain of salt because I'm sure that there are support stories that are very favorable but these don't get posted because when things go right, that's what you expect so you don't bother to say it.
Okay... now that all that is said and done... the review:
Technology:
It has everything you can ask for in a desktop replacement system. It includes all standard ports(PS/2, parallel, serial, USB) including FireWire and an S-Video out port. The CPU is the new mobile Pentium III (PIII-M 1.0ghz), which is supposed to run faster, cooler and with lower power consumption than previous mobile Pentium III CPUs. The video card is the NVidia Go2 chipset and comes in 16MB DDR or 32MB DDR (mine was 32MB). According to various reviews from magazines and other sites, this is the fastest graphics chip for notebook. So if you're a gamer... this could be your answer to gaming on the go.
Screen and Keyboard:
The 15" screen is very nice, bright and clear. The one I have has UXGA resolution, that's 1600 x 1200. It's very small for most people but you can always use 'Large Fonts' or even scale back to a lower resolution. That's the good thing about the newer video chipsets, they use 'anti-aliasing' which means you can set the LCD to lower resolutions, keep it full-screen and not degrade the quality too much... similar to regular monitors. The keyboard is top notch. I'm very particular about keyboards and I feel that this one and the one that HP uses is the best layout. You have full-size Enter/Shift keys and the navigation keys (PgUp/PgDn/Home/End) have their own cluster at the top of the keyboard instead of down the right hand side. This allows for a wider keyboard that is closer to a desktop keyboard feel and layout.
Drives:
This has 3 drives internally at the same time. The hard drive is a 20GB IBM drive running at 4800rpm, still slower than desktop drives. The fixed optical drive is a combo DVD/CD-RW drive with 4-rewrite/4-write/24-read speed. You have the option of CD-ROM, DVD or CD-RW drives as your fixed drive. There is a modular drive bay that can be used for any of the above drives or a floppy drive or Zip drive. It can also be used for a 2nd battery. What's great is that you don't have to swap out any drives or hook anything up externally because you can run 3 spindles internally.
Performance and Battery Life:
Very good... better than my desktop systems but that's not fair as 1 of them is an older PIII. I have 256mb of memory in this system and it's running Windows 2000, so it's pretty fast. I have no problems running any of my development apps (I'm a software programmer). As for battery life, it lasted about 2 hours and 45 minutes on my battery test, which I thought was pretty good. I know there are notebooks out there that last a lot longer but I doubt they have 15" screens and 3 drives too.
Conclusion:
Again... this is not a thin and light notebook. It weighs over 9 pounds so it's not easy to take everywhere but it's manageable. For the price, I think you get what you pay for here. This is a great system and I recommend it if you are looking for a powerhouse notebook to replace your current desktop system.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): $2000
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 801-900
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 21-30
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Epinions.com ID:
erick
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Member: Erick Reyes
Location: Orange County, CA
Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
Software programmer and recreational basketball player.
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