Inspiron notebook impressive at a good price

Open your mailbox and a blue-and-white Dell flyer is likely to fall out.

The Texas-based creation of computer tycoon Michael Dell has fine-tuned the direct-selling model and taken a sizeable share of the computer market as a result.

Apart from low-end Dell models sold at The Warehouse, orders for computers are placed through a call centre or its website. As soon as the order is placed, some workers in an Asian factory put your computer together to your specifications.

The process seems to work okay, though you'll be hit with a $99 delivery fee for the machine to be couriered to you. Dell in the process has developed a name for providing good-value, no-frills computers.

After playing with some gorgeous Toshiba and Sony laptops lately, test-driving the Dell Inspiron 6000 is a bit like getting out of an Audi TT and into a Toyota Corolla.

But who has $4000-plus to burn on a laptop? And the standardisation of many once-exclusive features into laptops has closed the gap between the mid- and top-end of the laptop market. In the middle, the Inspiron 6000 looks like good value.

It comes with an impressive 1 gigabyte of RAM and a 60GB hard drive. Those attributes set you up to handle the requirements of most software packages on the market.

Portable music players such as the Gigabeat and iPod are already selling with 60GB hard drives, so you'd expect a device the size of the Inspiron to come with a heap more storage space.

But it has become much cheaper to upgrade to larger hard drives, even those designed for laptops. It would be nice to see Dell throw in a 120GB drive, but I can live a leaner life on 60GB for the meantime.

The Inspiron has the Intel Centrino chipset now standard in good laptops, in this case a Pentium M 740, 1.73GHz processor.

PC benchmarking websites have the Inspiron comparing well in performance tests against competitors in the same class. Battery life is claimed to be 4h 20m with the power-efficient Pentium M chip, but use of wi-fi, Bluetooth and the DVD drive will knock that down to between 2h and 3h, the average for standard laptop batteries.

That multi-format DVD burner comes with a sturdy carriage to handle DVDs and CDs.

For connectivity, the Inspiron covers the bases: four USB ports, Firewire, an SD slot for transferring files via flash memory card, S-video port, PC card drive and TV out for connecting a separate monitor.

It has built-in Bluetooth for short-distance wireless connections to Bluetooth phones, PDAs, printers and other computers. A wi-fi for wireless networking is also included, through there is no physical switch to turn off this feature, which is annoying. You have you go into the software interface to disable wi-fi, which taxes battery life.

The 15.4in screen isn't as attractive as the more expensive Toshiba Qosmios, but the Inspiron does a good job with video playback, and the extra screen space makes the machine ideal for moving around the house or as a desktop replacement.

The Dell Media Experience software that comes packaged with the Inspiron is nothing flash, but will suit those who just want to load up a DVD and hit play.

The Inspiron caters well to those who want to use their computer for entertainment - much better than other machines that profess to be "multimedia" laptops.

A row of seven buttons lining the front of the Inspiron controls things like volume and track selection. The buttons are backlit for navigating in the dark.

The Inspiron's drawback is that it's a thick wedge of a machine weighing more than 3.2kg. But if mobile computing is what you're after, there are plenty of other laptops out there, some in the Dell family. The Inspiron counters its bulk with impressive functionality.

* Inspiron notebook

Price: $2399 (plus $99 delivery)
Pros: Solid package for a decent price.
Cons: No physical switch to turn off wi-fi capabilities.
Herald rating: 8/10