Dell Inspiron 9100 Review

Good Points
Sharp display, super fast, never had any problems, nice sound!! keys on keyboard where they should be!!!

Bad Points
A little bit large, but not too bad. Little bit of problems with video out (I might just not know how to do it properly). Short battery life (small trade off for powerful processor) stuck pixels in LCD screen.

General Comments
The Dell Inspiron 9100 is super fast. I'm on it right now, actually. Here's what I have under the hood:

Pent 4 3.0 Ghz with hyperthreading

40 GB hard drive

1.0 GB ddr RAM (WOO!)

128 MB ATI radeon 9700 graphics

cd burner/dvd rom drive

wireless network card b/g

4 usb 2.0 ports

1394 port

ethernet card/modem

built in "subwoofer"

s-video and dvi

I think that's all that's important.

The sound from this thing is amazing. It doesn't have that wimpy "laptop" sound. It has an awesome "subwoofer" that really does bring out the lows and is just a great sound.

The graphics card and the uxga LCD screen is really good for playing games/watching movies. The screen has a stuck pixel in it (right in the centre) and dell said that it would be too costly to create "perfect" screens so if you don't have more than 5 stuck pixels, they wont fix it. But with how small they are, it's hardly noticeable.

I've had a whole bunch of web pages open, working in Microsoft office, had streaming video, and playing mp3s all at the same time and had absolutely zero slowing down.

One thing I really like is the keyboard. Some smaller laptops have the delete keys and the arrow keys at the bottom or somewhere else to save space or they combine them with the letters or something. This keyboard has all the keys, exactly where you would expect to find them. Game playing is a little awkward because of the keyboard being right in the centre, I like mine off to the side just a little when I'm playing games. But it's still good. This is the best computer I have ever used, laptop or desktop. It has not only the touchpad but also the little trackstick. I'm so used to using both that when I use my girlfriends laptop with only the touchpad, I miss my trackstick. Anyway... the 9100 is great. I got mine with a camera and printer for 2000.