Dell Inspiron 2650 Review

“Had my Dell Inspiron 2650 Laptop for 3 months and it...”

Written on: 23/09/2002 by Jay.

Good Points
Price.

Bad Points
Tech Support, incorrectly configured.

General Comments
Had my Dell Inspiron 2650 Laptop for 3 months and it has performed very well. The 16mb graphics card nvidea geforce 2 is good enough for most games today (plays return castle wolfenstien very well). Overall performance is quite good, i chose the dell over the sony viao pcg-fx701 which had a similar spec (+ a few extras like infra red port and tv-out)

Build quality is good but not excellent as the screen does make a creaking sound when you close it. The LCD display is good, but looking at the screen from an angle (other than straight on) it does look quite dark, i.m not sure if this problem is due to the limitation of current LCD technology or to the screens DELL use.

The keyboard is good, free from any squeaks or rattles but sometimes if you type too fast it doesn't pick up the keys you have pressed.



I did have one problem with it when i changed the printer mode in the BIOS from ECP to EPP then When i tried to eject the cd tray from windows xp the shortcut key FN+F10 the whole machine would freeze up. I'm not sure if this was due to a DMA conflict or BIOS fault (may require a BIOS update). I did email DELL support but they didn't bother getting back to me.



The inbuilt speakers are quite decent for a laptop. Producng a clear sound, free from distortion. Not sure what the exact spec of the sound card is.



Can't comment on the battery life because i use the laptop as a desktop replacement and run it off the mains.



One major problem i had was with the DVD-rom, you can only change the region setting 4 times only, then it locks!! I have heard you can flash the bios drive to unlock it, but after hearing many disasters from other people who have tried it. I decided not to. And the region setting from the factory was set to region 1 (i.e for the USA), as a UK resident, it should have set to region 2. And also the 'paging file' set up was incorrect. It should have been set to where windows handles the exact amount NOT the user, as the hardrive was constantly writing data, till i changed it.





Overall this is a good machine (can't compare with other laptop manufacturers, as this is my first laptop).


Tech spec:



P4 1.7ghz

256 ddr ram

14.1 lcd screen

20gb hard drive

v92 56k modem inbuilt

NO network card

DVD drive

price £1060

1 year collect and return to base warranty