Dell Inspiron E1505 (Core 2 Duo)

Dell's Inspiron E1505 has been on the market forever (relatively speaking, for notebooks), but it's still a force to be reckoned with, holding the number-one spot on two of our tests in this roundup.
 
Dell's white, silver, and black design is getting dated, but we won't complain about its functionality, with multimedia buttons on the front edge and a 15.4-inch glossy widescreen. The full-sized keyboard is very quiet and comfortable, and the touchpad has vertical and horizontal scroll areas.
 
The new-generation panel (with Dell's TrueLife Technology) is brighter and more saturated than previous LCDs, and it shows. The comfortable 1280 x 800-pixel screen delivered crisp text and gorgeous DVD playback, with excellent detail reproduction in dark scenes and little motion blur. But our test unit did stutter and pause when playing back a DVD; after rebooting a couple of times, the problem didn't resurface. The built-in stereo speakers delivered good sound quality; there's distortion at the highest volume levels, but the speakers are powerful enough that you won't need to turn them up that high.
 
The handy Dell MediaDirect utility lets you access music, photos, videos, DVDs, and even your contacts and presentations without booting into the OS. Just press the dedicated button above the keyboard, and the attractive MediaDirect UI pops up in about 10 seconds (compared with 60 seconds needed to launch Vista). Dell also includes the WordPerfect word processor and Dell Jukebox for ripping music and burning CDs.
 
The E1505's 1.83-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU with 2GB of RAM had a good showing on PCMark05; its score of 3,923 is at the top of the range for mainstream notebooks running Vista. The 3D oomph of the ATI Mobility X1400 GPU is fine for everyday tasks and for handling Vista Home Premium's eye candy; with a Windows Experience Index graphics subscore of 3.7, the E1505 is on the high side for this class. But as with others in this roundup, this notebook is not for serious 3D gaming; the E1505 delivered an impressive 106 fps at 640 x 480-pixel resolution on F.E.A.R. but a sad 7 fps with the settings maxed.
 
Port selection on this notebook is standard and includes an ExpressCard slot and a 5-in-1 media card reader. The nine-cell battery that came with our test unit pushed the system weight to 7.2 pounds (from 6.8 pounds), which is on the heavy side. But the extended runtime of 3:25--not surprisingly, the longest in the roundup--is welcome. Wireless throughput of 15 Mbps at 50 feet was good.
 
There's a lot to like about the Inspiron E1505. The screen is beautiful, and there are just enough multimedia features to keep it interesting. If you can get past the love-it-or-leave-it design, the price and feature set are tough to beat.

 

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