Dell Inspiron 4100 Review Birmingham AL

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Originally published at Internet.com

Not Too Big, Not Too Small, and Definitely Not Too Slow

The Dell Inspiron 4100 is a notebook that'll make you think four times. It's powerful enough -- with Intel's fastest (1.2GHz) mobile Pentium III processor and ATI Mobility Radeon graphics chip -- to make you think twice about getting a desktop PC. And it's light enough to make you think twice about getting a heavier "desktop replacement" portable like Dell's Inspiron 8100 or Gateway's Solo 9550.

Laptops like the latter are so-called three-spindle designs, with room for three internal drives (usually floppy, hard, and optical). The Inspiron 4100, like the model 4000 it replaces, is a two-spindle system, with an internal 20GB hard disk and a swappable modular bay that can hold a 1.44MB floppy drive, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, or a second battery pack. Windows 2000 Professional makes stopping and removing the floppy and inserting the optical drive (or vice versa) a quick, no-reboot maneuver, but the capacity of the CD-RW makes it unlikely you'll use the floppy much. (If you insist, a $10 external floppy cable lets you use both drives simultaneously.)

The 4100 also has a 14.1-inch active-matrix screen instead of a flagship laptop's 15-inch panel -- which lets the 10 by 12.5 by 1.4-inch system slip into the notebook compartment of our briefcase, where 15-inch models won't fit, and makes it much easier to carry at 6.25 pounds with the combo drive. (It's 6.0 pounds with the floppy or 5.6 pounds with neither, using an empty plastic travel bay that's a $5 option; the averagely bulky AC adapter adds one pound to your briefcase weight.)

But settling for a 14.1-inch LCD doesn't mean you must settle for the usual 1,024 by 768-pixel (XGA) resolution. Our test model had a 1,400 by 1,050 (SXGA+) display, which gave noticeably more workspace without making menus and icons too tiny to read comfortably. As a third choice, eagle-eyed spreadsheet or image editors can order a model with 1,600 by 1,200 (UXGA) resolution, but we suspect that really would make us wish for 15 instead of 14.1 inches -- we vote for the middle option, especially since it costs only $80 more than XGA and $150 less than UXGA.

Speaking of prices, our Inspiron 4100 rings up at $2,410 (checking the small business rather than home area of Dell's Web site in order to match its configuration with Win 2000 Pro instead of Win XP). That looks steep in this era of $1,999-and-less laptop bargains, but it's loaded with the 1.2GHz Pentium III-M, 256MB of SDRAM, the 20GB hard disk and DVD/CD-RW combo drive, Microsoft Office XP Small Business Edition, and a $159 internal (Mini PCI) 802.11b wireless network adapter as well as both 10/100Mbps wired Ethernet and 56Kbps modem ports. It also includes a three-year warranty with mail-in service; three years of on-site service plus Dell's CompleteCare, which offers repair or replacement even for accidents like drops or beverage spills, would cost $289 more.

Nor does the $2,410 tag reflect any of the $100-off, free-memory-upgrade, or other discount deals that come and go on Dell's site almost daily. Between them and configuration choices such as Windows XP Home Edition ($99 less), a 1.13GHz ($100 less) or 1.0GHz processor ($250 less), or plain CD-RW instead of combo drive ($70 less), you should find budget room to maneuver. Still, we wish Dell would trim off another $150 or so to match the Inspiron's trim size and weight. That would make it the first computer to get a five- instead of four-star rating in our time at Hardware

The Fastest Notebook We've Tested

We already mentioned that the 4100 is set for both wired and wireless networking as well as dial-up modem connectivity, but there are plenty of other expansion options to mention -- although digital video or fast-external-storage addicts won't find an IEEE 1394 port. Two PC Card slots are on the left, with infrared, microphone, and headphone ports as well as the modem and Ethernet connectors and a TV-out port (a TV cable costs $10) on the right.

Around back, you'll find parallel, serial, and VGA monitor ports; one USB port; one PS/2 mouse or keyboard port; and a socket for a $199 port replicator with two USB and two PS/2 as well as parallel, serial, VGA, and network connections. The Inspiron's two DIMM sockets support up to 1GB of SDRAM memory, accessible (as is the hard disk) by removing screws on the system's bottom. The lithium-ion battery and swappable-bay devices slide out with the push of a latch; a second battery pack for the swappable bay is $99.

The Inspiron uses ATI's Mobility Radeon graphics controller with 16MB of memory. This is the so-called M6 chip, not the soon-to-ship mobile version of the Radeon 7500, but it's still no slouch: The Dell delivered a smooth 63 frames per second playing Quake III Arena in 800 by 600 High Quality mode (96 fps at 640 by 480), barely slower than Nvidia's much-touted GeForce2 Go in a Toshiba Satellite 3005 we tested a couple of months ago.

For more businesslike applications, the ATI chip and 1,400 by 1,050-pixel display are simply great, delivering crisp text and vivid color with no bad pixels -- we actually used Office XP for two days before bothering to see if we could turn the brightness and contrast up (we could). DVD movie playback was a little dark but smooth and stylish, as was using the Toshiba SDR2102 drive as an 8/8/24X CD-RW; Roxio Easy CD Creator 5.1 Basic and InterVideo's WinDVD 3.0 are preinstalled.

The 4100's keyboard is as comfortable as its screen, with a soft but sure typing touch and dedicated Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys apart from the cursor arrows. Dell provides both a touchpad and a pointing-stick mouse substitute, each with its own pair of slightly stiff mouse buttons; we found ourselves using the touchpad and lower (front-edge) buttons and ignoring the upper set. Music lovers will note the Inspiron doesn't have dedicated audio CD player or multimedia buttons as many consumer laptops do, though there's a launch button for Dell's help site.

And for really taking care of business, Intel's 1.2GHz Tualatin Pentium III-M makes us reconsider what we said about saving money by choosing a slightly slower processor: The Inspiron's new CPU and i830 chipset yielded benchmark numbers fully 40 percent faster than older, 1.0GHz P-III laptops we've tested, posting an overall score of 135 in BAPco's SysMark 2001 (with a 127 in Office Productivity balanced by a 144 in Internet Content Creation).

That's roughly the performance of a 1.4GHz Pentium 4 RDRAM desktop, enough for any job short of extreme 3D rendering or statistical modeling -- and we've never seen a Pentium 4 desktop that can run for a healthy three and a half hours without needing an AC outlet, as the Dell did during our longest (mostly word processing and e-mail, with some modem use) unplugged session. Even more energy-intensive CD and DVD use didn't knock battery life much below three hours.

As you can tell, we're very impressed by the Inspiron 4100: Though no three-pound slimline, it's light enough to carry without being a burden, yet it's aa versatile and terrifically speedy desktop alternative with every networking option you could desire. We think its modular design and 14.1-inch yet high-resolution screen both hit the sweet spot, and its price is, well, close to the sweet spot.

Pros: * Blazing 1.2GHz Pentium III-M performance; surprisingly good battery life * Two pounds lighter than "desktop replacement" notebooks; better-than-XGA resolution without a 15-inch screen's bulk

Cons: * A bit pricey by the time you add both 1.2GHz and 802.11b * No 1394/FireWire port