Dell Inspiron 2500 Review

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.

Skip To Page 1 Traveling Semi-Economy Class • 2 Flunking the Pitney-Bowes Benchmark 3 Pros, Cons, and Conclusions

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