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 Dell Inspiron 6000Six hours of unplugged power in a slick white and silver design. Price:
$1,913
Dell's Inspiron 6000 is one of the first notebooks to take advantage of Intel's new Sonoma Platform and Alviso chipset, the 915GM/PM. This next-generation of Centrino technology represents a big step forward in performance and battery life. And Dell wraps these improvements in a slightly heavy but sleek-looking 7.5-pound widescreen notebook with all sorts of multimedia amenities, including stereo speakers, a full set of multimedia controls, and a DVD burner.
The first major improvement is the PCI Express bus, which not only allows for a higher data throughput, but is also bidirectional, meaning it can transfer data both to and from a PCIe card at the same time. The Inspiron 6000's 533-MHz front side bus (FSB) is 33 percent faster than previous Pentium M systems. Another big advantage of the Alviso chipset is DDR2 memory, which doubles the clock speeds of DDR SDRAM. A stick of 400-MHz in DDR2 runs at 800 MHz, which helps satisfy in the inner speed demon in us. Combined with a 1.6-GHz Intel Pentium M 730, the Inspiron 6000 is significantly faster than older Centrino notebooks with higher clock speeds, as it posted an outstanding MobileMark score of 210. Possibly the best feature on this notebook is its spectacularly long battery lifeNclocking in at just over 6 hours. We've tested two other notebooks that had similar runtimes, and neither offered the same performance. With a wireless Internet connection, the battery life dropped only by 10 minutes. Nothing is worse than lugging a laptop onto an airplane to watch some DVDs, only to run out of juice halfway through; this kind of battery life can get you from New York to Los Angeles. For the 6000, the Inspiron chassis has been redesigned, with its silver exterior and a white border, which for some will be a welcome change from the gray and black color schemes that dominate most notebooks. A set of multimedia buttons along the front panel lets you control volume and playback functions, an increasingly standard feature as the growth of DVDs continues to skyrocket. Other features include four USB 2.0 ports, an SD slot for swapping files with your camera or PDA, and FireWire for those looking to hook up a camcorder. When it's time to output your footage to a DVD, you'll appreciate the 8X DVD burner that also handles high-capacity dual-layer discs. The Inspiron's DVD playback was smooth and reliable in our tests. The maximum resolution on our model was 1280 x 800, but optional UltraSharp models can reach 1920 x 1200. The stereo sound from the speakers is clear, but about what you'd expect from a two-speaker notebook. An S-Video port is there for outputting the signal to a TV. This Inspiron features an 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connection and optional Bluetooth 2.0 technology, so you can connect to the Web wirelessly and communicate with all sort of Bluetooth-enabled devices. Finding a nearby network is easy with the provided Intel PROSet wireless software, which shows the network name, whether security is enabled, the signal strength, and the type of connection. Intel's Media Accelerator 900 graphics processor won't confuse gamers with chipsets from Nvidia or ATI, but in our tests the Inspiron did an adequate job running Doom 3 at 640 x 480 and low quality, producing minimal choppiness and frame stuttering. We could not, however, successfully load Half Life 2, although it's unclear whether that was due to performance issues or Valve's overly aggressive copy protection. Regardless, the Inspiron 6000 should allow you to you to squeak by in the latest high-end games. The software bundle and warranty are about average for this type of system. Dell includes a copy of WordPerfect 12 and McAfee Security Center, and you get a year of coverage on the warranty. There are only a couple of things that rubbed us the wrong way on the 6000. One is a power-saving feature that drastically dims the display while the system is running on battery, but that can be altered in the power manager settings to a more reasonable brightness. Our other pet peeve is the noisy optical drive, which you'll just have to live with. Overall, the Inspiron 6000 is a shining example of what the next generation of Centrino technology can do. It's very fast, lasts a very long time between charges, and is very reasonably priced, especially considering all of the high-end features Dell includes. Compare Prices | Dell Inspiron 6000 Specifications
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