Dell Inspiron 2500 Review Birmingham AL

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Originally published at Internet.com

We admit it: they're easy to make fun of, but we secretly like the $19 optional plastic palmrest inserts that turn the front corners of the Dell Inspiron 2500's keyboard from basic black to cheery yellow, blue, or purple. Not only are they a tiny touch of personality, but they get rid of the stock keyboard's (and most laptops') ugly "Intel Inside" and "Designed for Microsoft Windows" stickers.

We'd be happier, however, if Dell let you pick one color pair of snap-ins for free instead of charging $19 for several (and we're not even going to consider the $39 "iridescent jade" option), because the 2500 is the company's lowest-priced portable. In its most bare-bones configuration, it lets you get not some no-name import notebook but a Dell, with a bright active-matrix instead of squinty, streaky dual-scan display, for just $999.

Unfortunately, that model's compromises far outweigh its value: The processor is a tolerable 700MHz Celeron, but the screen is a humble 12.1-inch (diagonal), 800 by 600-pixel panel that leaves lots of blank plastic around the edges; the system comes with a lean 64MB of RAM, 5GB hard disk, and downsized battery pack; and it even chops Dell's usual three-year warranty down to one.

Happily, the Inspiron 2500 offers all the build-to-order flexibility that made Dell and other direct vendors great. To begin with, if you don't like the 12.1-inch screen, you can choose a 1,024 by 768-pixel, active-matrix LCD in either a 14.1-inch or spacious 15.0-inch size. If you yawn at Celeron/700 speed, opt for a Pentium III at either 700MHz or 850MHz.

Give the preinstalled Windows Millennium Edition room to maneuver with a 10GB or 20GB hard disk and at least 128MB of SDRAM (though the system hits its ceiling at 256MB, less than other Inspirons). Replace the standard CD-ROM with either a DVD-ROM or CD-RW drive. And before you know it, you've got a notebook that can compete with any desktop-replacement mobile on the market.

The Catch-22, of course, is that you've jacked up the price. The Inspiron 2500 we tested -- with a Pentium III/700 processor, 128MB of memory, 10GB hard disk, DVD, and 15-inch display -- is frankly one of the nicest notebooks we've tried, a bit bulky and heavy for frequent fliers but boasting three-hour battery life and first-class screen and keyboard comfort. It's also a decent deal at $2,019, but at that price hardly qualifies for the entry-level or value category. So as much as we like it, we'd find ourselves eyeing Dell's Inspiron 4000 (a slimmer system with a swappable optical bay) or Toshiba's Satellite 2805 (a similarly hefty, big-screened machine, but with superior gaming graphics and a combo DVD/CD-RW drive) instead.

Flunking the Pitney-Bowes Benchmark

With the 15-inch screen, DVD-ROM, and eight-cell (rather than the stripper model's four-cell) lithium-ion battery, our Inspiron 2500 weighed a lap-flattening 8 pounds on internet.com's electronic postage scale. If you also pack the AC adapter -- a burly brick with a three-prong grounded outlet -- you'll be toting 9 pounds total. And like other 15-inch-LCD laptops, the Dell takes a lot of briefcase space, measuring 10.8 by 12.8 by 1.7 inches.

At least the system's size makes room for plenty of ports and expansion options (although would-be video editors will bemoan the lack of IEEE 1394 and TV-out ports). Along the right side are two PC Card slots (stacked to accommodate two Type II or one Type III card, as on most machines) and an RJ-11 jack for the internal Mini PCI-based 56Kbps modem (a Mini PCI modem/Ethernet combo is only $30 more).

The fixed optical drive (either a 24X CD-ROM, 8X DVD-ROM, or 8X/4X/24X CD-RW) is at the left, with the 1.44MB floppy and battery pack (both removable; the former can be swapped for a 100MB Zip drive or empty weight-saving module) up front. Parallel, serial, VGA, one PS/2, and two USB ports sit beside two cooling fans at the rear.

The 15-inch XGA (1,024 by 768) TFT screen is as bright as it is big; although we found ourselves fiddling with the screen angle to enjoy DVD viewing in a brightly lit office, both everyday text and digital-image graphics were sharp and sweet.

But while the LCD is as good as it gets, we can't say the same for the 2500's budget-minded Intel 815EM (a.k.a. Solano-2M) integrated chipset, which dynamically borrows system memory for the display; for a bit of a performance boost, our system had 4MB of dedicated graphics cache (a $49 option). Officially, the graphics subsystem is capable of 1,600 by 1,200 resolution on an external monitor, but only with 256 colors; CRT users will want to stop at 1,280 by 1,024 pixels.

Serious gamers and first-person shooter studs will look down their noses at any 815EM system -- and as mentioned above, when we started pricing an Inspiron 2500 loaded with an 850MHz Pentium III, 15-inch LCD, and 20GB hard disk, we ran smack into Toshiba's $2,399 Satellite 2805 with its far faster Nvidia GeForce2Go 3D accelerator, combo DVD/CD-RW, and FireWire port. To be fair, however, the Inspiron's graphics were great for the supplied Microsoft Works Suite software, and smooth and sharp when watching movies with the InterVideo WinDVD player.

Pros, Cons, and Conclusions

Our only DVD complaint was that the Dell's volume-control buttons didn't work with the InterVideo player, though they turned up and down the volume of audio CDs just fine. A utility in the Windows taskbar tray toggles four buttons above the keyboard between multimedia (pause/play, next and previous track) and Internet (shortcut access to Dell support and e-mail) functions.

Compared to the fairly mushy feel of most laptops, the 2500's keyboard has a bit more click to it; after a few minutes to adjust to the smallish Insert, Delete, Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys stashed in the upper right corner, we found it well above average for high-speed typing. Similar kudos go to the Dell's touchpad, which lets you tap either the pad or two good-sized mouse buttons mounted below it and offers plenty of fine-tuning and customizing options via its software driver.

Of the Inspiron's three CPU choices, we'd pick the middle option, the 700MHz Pentium III in our test system; even with Intel's SpeedStep throttling it down to something like 550MHz while on battery power, it gave snappy performance and swift application loading.

And even though it weighs more than the four-cell pack, we'd definitely opt for the eight-cell, 59WHr lithium-ion battery -- in a mix of low-octane word processing and battery-hungry DVD and audio CD playback, we repeatedly saw an honest three hours between charges.

Adding everything up, our verdict on Dell's Inspiron 2500 reads like this:

Pros: * Prices for 15-inch-screen models start under $1,500 * Cool keyboard, display, and DVD performance * Good battery life

Cons: * Price climbs fast as you add options * Big 'n' heavy * Penny-pinching graphics chipset and fixed, not modular, hard and optical drives

In other words, the 2500 illustrates both the happy availability of really good, affordable laptops nowadays and how all-too-easy it is to configure one right out of your price range. If we could swallow our big-screen pride, we'd save $250 by choosing a unit with a 14.1-inch display, and have a great (if slightly overweight) portable productivity