Dell Inspiron 9100

Fast and reliable. I've had mine since they debuted in 2004. With a 3.4Ghz dual-core Pentium 'D" w/ bus speed of 800Mhz, laptops are only now catching this desktop replacement.I wish Dell still made something like this - the current models seem much cheaper and the glossy screens are hard to read. Battery life < 2 hrs. Very, very warm.

Fast user friendly can upgrade on part easy to take apart just a great laptop. I feel I have experienced no bad points about this Dell Inspiron 9100.What is there to say that has not been said about this great laptop.

I bought the DELL Inspiron 9100 despite the bad points. When I was looking for a laptop I wanted one which was powerful enough to run Cubase SX3 and VST plugins and perform live music with it on stage.

So I did not use it for office or working on the train or travel with it.

Now, a few years later, it's already outdated but I don't care. I even recently expanded it's memory up to 2Gb for better performance. It was worth the money.

The sound quality is still much better than what I've come across lately, especially the subwoofer which is integrated in the battery, gives this extra bass-sound which most of the laptops out there don't have.

Since the first day I've bought it, the Inspiron 9100 has never let me down. I has never been broken or anything. But the battery is poor. I've bought a surrogate one on Ebay with larger capacity but even then it consumes it all up in about 1,5 hour.

It's a big fast monster if you ask me.:-)

Replacement? That would definitely be one the new XPS series notebooks from DELL.

Unfortunately, my Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop has broken down with major problems 5 times. Dell will not replace my lemon or extend the warranty. I waited 1 month to get my laptop back, and they mailed it to the wrong address.

Also, I was on the phone to them for over 1 hour. I asked for a replacement, but I lost the call.

When it's working it is a dream, everything loads quickly, really is wonderful to use (as long as you're using a mouse).

When it breaks it breaks in style:

The first time the memory went pop and they replaced it - I still got blue screens every now and again but they told there was nothing wrong with that!! The second time it died completely, blue screens and wouldn't boot, and then complete failure, and they replaced the motherboard after I argued with them that was the faulty component all along. They also replaced the CPU and the hard drive - which did not need replacing so I lost all my work.

When it returned the system was still broken - had to tell them to supply me with yet another batch of new memory for me to replace myself. They also put a slower hard drive than I had paid for and they also had to send me this to replace myself. All in all, I must have spent over 8 hours on the phone paying a fortune for each minute for them to run me through a huge array of tests that I had already run.

It is now working fine (touch wood) but I would not buy another Dell unless I had to. They seem generally good to use, but they seem to break frequently and the hassle to get it fixed is enormous! Just as a comparison, a friends IBM laptop broke after 2 and a half years, someone came around and repaired it the next day. My laptop took 2 weeks each time it failed to be repaired, plus around 4 hours on the phone for each failure paying a fortune! Maybe it is worth paying the little extra for an IBM or Toshiba - or even a little less for an Acer?!?

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.

The Dell Insipron 9100 is a GREAT laptop. My notebook specs are P4 3.2 GHZ (MAX) 512MB DDR 3200 (400MHZ) FAST for a notebook for now 2004. Later the memory will be faster for notebooks I hope. I have a 100GB drive. Hope it will not have any problems at all.