Dell Inspiron 9400

I bought this laptop in December 2006. I searched around for a decent laptop and decided to go forthe 9400. It cost £550 with a years warranty and was at least £150 cheaper then any laptop with a 17" screen. The reasons I bougt it were

- Fast processor (Core 2 Duo)

- Large screen

- Decent hard disk space and RAM

- External connectivity (6 usb ports)

- Looks

- Brand

- Longevity due to high spec

I have never had a thing go wrong with this laptop. I work in the IT sector so it helps that I can protect the laptop from viruses etc which keeps it stable. Even so you can expect some drop in performance but Inever noticed any. I increased the RAM to 2GB 2 years after I had it as I played a game which demanded a fair amount of memory. It multi tasks with such ease and rarely gets hot due to demands on the processor. It has 2 fans though to stop the processor from burning out.

In January 2010 I bought a new high spec hard drive and a windows 7 licence. I also increased the RAM to 3GB. It absolutely flies along and has saved me hundreds of pounds as I have nt needed to purchase a new laptop. If you are still happily running this laptop with XP just keep it as it will keep going. If you use it for gaming it will struggle with the latest games but that wasn't the main reason I bought it.

Overall, a great buy and I will be running this for a couple more years yet.

Overall I am happy with this laptop. It looks good, is well built and the screen is stunning. Although hardware on laptops do outdated very quickly. I bought this laptop 11 months ago and it already struggled with the latest games.

You can buy an extra battery or upgrade the battery from a 6 cell to 9 cell which will certainly help the battery life greatly.

This laptop has everything I need on it, including wireless, bluetooth, etc and I haven't had any problems. The only issue I have is it already struggles to play the latest games, but I think this is because the screen resolution is 1920x1200 and the 7900GS graphics card simply cannot cope with games at that resolution.

I would recommend the 9400 to anyone, but I do not recommend buying the larger 17" 1920x1200 screen is you are going to be gaming, or travelling a lot. If you want to do gaming, it's best to buy a desktop PC.