I bought aDell Inspiron in 2003 to write my thesis; it's 2009 and my computer is still performing well.
Battery life does "suck" fom the beginning. And I now need more memory but this computer has served me well.

I've had the Dell Inspiron 2650 for two years. For the price, it has been much better than average. Counting the resale value it has cost me about $1.10 per day. It is still going strong and will last a couple of more years. Wish you could add more than the 512 ram.

This is the best laptop for the price good performance for basic applications. Good viewing area with 15 inch screen bigger than most.

This Dell model is a perfect soloution for customers that are seeking for a plain system with high performance, not very good for multimedia task but it still run games pertty good.

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