Dell Inspiron 1150 Review Birmingham AL

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Originally published at Internet.com

More Than Generic

Trying to hit a specific price when configuring a Dell system is like trying to hit your ball through the windmill at the miniature golf course.

The company's Web site offers different mail-in and/or instant rebates and/or component upgrades every day, if not every hour; the other day, a rebate and free upgrade from a DVD-ROM to DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive pegged our Inspiron 1150 test notebook at $957, but this morning it's a deal-less $1,066. So this review, intended to find how much value Dell's new entry-level laptop delivers for under a grand, will have to be something of a compromise.

Actually, the successor to the Inspiron 1100 is inevitably about compromise: It's not hard to find a terrific notebook for $1,400 or $1,500 these days, but (as readers of our quarterly Grand Openings survey know) pinching pennies to target a three-digit price tag gets tough. Our test unit's 14.1-inch screen was perfectly fine, but the blank plastic surrounding it seemed to taunt, "Couldn't cough up the extra $50 for the 15.0-inch model, eh?"

Cordless, Cardless Wireless

Both available displays offer good old XGA (1,024 by 768) resolution. Ours was bright (at least at the top two of eight backlight settings) and bad-pixel-free, though it occasionally seemed to show not actual flickers but minute fluctuations in brightness during work sessions on battery power.

But while the display is more than adequate for mainstream work, the Intel 825GME chipset's integrated graphics are strictly Web- and word processing- rather than image-editing- or game-oriented. Besides stealing a minimum of 8MB from our test system's scanty 256MB of memory, they flunked most of our game benchmarks (though the laptop limped through Quake III Arena and an Unreal Tournament 2003 flyby at 25 and 11 frames per second, respectively) and led to a rock-bottom score of 62, with only one of four game simulations completed, in Futuremark's 3DMark03.

But hey, Dell's Inspiron XPS got 3,324 on 3DMark03 in our review in March; the low-budget students and business travelers eyeing the 1150 are more concerned about productivity and connectivity. The big plus on the latter score, compared to the 1100 model, is that the new laptop offers not only 56Kbps modem and 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports but built-in 802.11b/g wireless networking via a Mini PCI adapter, without having to fill its single PC Card slot as its predecessor did. (A dual-mode 802.11a/b/g adapter is $20 more.)

Combining wireless Web and e-mail access with a slightly trimmer figure than many economy notebooks -- thanks in part to omitting an onboard floppy drive (an external USB floppy costs $49), the Inspiron 1150 weighs an even 7 pounds -- strikes a good balance for lap as well as desk use. The system's measurements are 10.8 by 12.9 by 1.8 inches; the 15-inch-screened model is fractionally heavier, and the AC adapter is a slightly chunky 18 ounces.

Another plus for portability is the unit's respectable battery life. Even with the standard 8-cell instead of optional 12-cell lithium-ion pack (the latter costs $29 more at purchase or $99 as a spare), we regularly got 2 hours and 40 minutes' use in disk- and multimedia-intensive software-installing and DVD-watching sessions.

Where the Shoe Pinches

You can save a few bucks by ordering an Inspiron with a 2.4GHz or 2.6GHz Celeron CPU, but the Pentium 4's evil twin's measly 128K of Level 2 cache and 400MHz front-side bus make it hard to love. Dell's configuration page defaults to the 2.66GHz Pentium 4 found in our test system, with 512K of L2 cache and 533MHz bus (don't expect Intel's 800MHz bus or Hyper-Threading in this price range).

The Pentium 4/2.66 is a more than adequate processor, but targeting the $1,000 price point takes its toll -- the system uses DDR266, not DDR333 or faster, memory, and our test unit came with a minimal 256MB of the stuff. Stepping up to 512MB is a good idea for any Windows XP system, especially one with integrated or shared-memory graphics, but would add $125 to the bottom line.

As is, the Inspiron delivered good, middle-of-the-road performance in our tests, helped by a cooling fan that isn't too loud and doesn't come on too often. Both its PCMark04 score of 2,680 (cpu 3,485; memory 2,560; hard disk 2,048; graphics 347) and BAPCo SysMark 2002 Office Productivity rating of 130 put it roughly on par with slimmer Pentium M/1.4 or /1.5 portables, and it christened the Labs, Weather, & Sports Desk's copy of SysMark 2004 with an overall score of 97 (Internet Content Creation 115, Office Productivity 81) -- roughly tying the SysMark 2004 reference platform, a desktop with a slower Pentium 4/2.0 processor but 512MB of RAM and a faster graphics adapter and hard disk.

Speaking of hard disks, our Dell's was a 4,200-rpm Hitachi with 30GB of storage; you can order a 40GB or 60GB drive for an extra $40 or $110, respectively. The fixed (non-swappable) Samsung optical drive combines 8X DVD-ROM playback with 24/10/24X CD-RW performance; we don't anticipate anyone using the Inspiron 1150 for video editing, but big backup buffs can spring for a DVD+RW burner for $140 more.

Plain Vanilla Value

Another reason to shun the 1150 for home-movie editing is that it lacks an IEEE 1394 FireWire port to plug in a camcorder; we don't consider that a drawback in this class, but did notice the absence of a TV-out port for any display other than a regular VGA/analog monitor. Two USB 2.0 ports and the Ethernet connector are at the back, with the modem jack on the right; microphone and headphone jacks are at the left, between the DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive and PC Card slot.

Similarly, the keyboard has one, count it, one special button for launching your Web browser, rather than an array of controls for audio CDs or DVDs. But after a minute to get used to the Delete key's placement (toward the bottom instead of top right), you'll appreciate its comfortable typing feel and complete layout, including the Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys that many laptops lack. The plus-sized touchpad and its two mouse buttons work smoothly; there's no fancy hardware scroll wheel, though you can mimic scrolling via the touchpad software driver.

Speaking of drivers, since we're inveterate hard-disk-wipers and software-reinstallers, we chalked up a small minus because Dell's software-based documentation and help screens, while thorough, don't match the handy disaster-recovery or factory-restore discs or partitions of many competitors, the most impressive being IBM; our Inspiron came with a generic Windows XP Home Edition CD plus disc of drivers for painstaking manual installation, the latter including the wrong version of the SigmaTel audio driver (we found the latter for download on Dell's support site). Other supplied software includes CyberLink's PowerDVD player, Sonic's RecordNow for CD and DVD burning, and trial versions of Symantec's Norton Internet Security and Jasc's Paint Shop Pro and Phooto Album image editor/manager duo.

So how does the Inspiron 1150 compare to the $949 or $999 HP or Toshiba notebooks at your local CompUSA or Best Buy? The latter often come with 15.0-inch screens (and occasionally wide-aspect-ratio screens) standard, but tend to pack anemic Celeron rather than Pentium 4 processors, weigh 8 or 8.5 instead of 7 pounds, and often lack onboard WiFi. So the Dell, if not technologically thrilling, is an able economy-class traveler. After visiting Dell's Web site, however, we can say it's a better value on some days than on others.

Pros: * A not-too-heavy laptop with comfortable keyboard, screen, and Pentium 4/2.66 power * Decent battery life; built-in 802.11b/g wireless

Cons: * Sluggish graphics; price climbs as you add memory, combo drive instead of DVD-ROM, and so on