Dell Inspiron 9400 Review

A minor but appreciated upgrade from the Inspiron 9300 model is the Inspiron 6000's inclusion of Dell's MediaDirect software, which plays CDs and DVDs and lets you access photos and other media files stored on your hard drive without booting up Windows first. The two speakers and the internal subwoofer -- a rare feature among laptops -- deliver crisp and rich sound. Better yet, because the speakers sit in the corners of the laptop's front edge, your hands won't muffle them while you're typing and you can play music with the lid closed. Sandwiched between the speakers, a row of seven buttons lets you control disc playback and adjust or mute the volume. However, the Inspiron 6000 lacks an integrated TV tuner found on more expensive systems, such as the Toshiba Qosmio G20 and the Fujitsu LifeBook N6210.

Our Inspiron 6000 test unit had a bright, vast, 17-inch widescreen display with a superfine WUXGA 1,900 x 1,200-pixel native resolution. Though we experienced no problems with our unit's display, we've observed many user complaints about other recent Dell models' screens.

There's no dearth of ports, jacks, or slots here: The Inspiron 6000 offers FireWire, S-Video out, VGA, a whopping six USB 2.0 ports, 56Kbps modem, 10/100 Ethernet, headphone and microphone jacks. Also available are Type II PC Card and Secure Digital slots and a swank DVI port should you want to connect the laptop to an even bigger digital LCD. There's also a five-in-one media card reader, a key feature that the Inspiron 9300 lacked. Last, but definitely not least, the Inspiron 6000 includes a multiformat double-layer DVD drive.

Like all of Dell's laptops, the Inspiron 6000 is extremely configurable. Our loaded, test configuration was equipped with a new Intel Core Duo T2500 (2.0GHz) processor; 1GB of DDR2 667MHz SDRAM; an 80GB, 5,400rpm hard drive; Nvidia's high-end GeForce Go 7800 GPU with 256MB of dedicated video memory; and a nine-cell battery.

One of the first Core Duo systems we've tested, the Dell Inspiron 6000 did not disappoint. Using a collection of multithreaded and single-threaded multimedia applications, we tested the Inspiron 6000 to determine how well it handled multimedia workloads, such as ripping MP3 and encoding video. Generally speaking, the Inspiron 6000 delivered roughly a 25 per cent performance boost compared with a Pentium 4-fueled test system, the Acer Aspire 1700, and its performance was approximately 50 percent faster than that of a ThinkPad Z60t equipped with Intel's previous generation 2.0GHz Pentium M processor.

The Inspiron 6000 also delivered very competent gaming performance, turning in 57 frames per second in our Doom 3 test. That said, the Acer TravelMate 8204, outfitted with the same processor but twice the RAM, bested the Inspiron 6000 in a few of our multimedia tests and posted the highest SysMark score we've ever recorded, though its gaming performance was lacking. Though we did not test an Inspiron 6000 configured with the less expensive Core Solo processor, Dell said that its performance would be comparable with that of an Inspiron 9300 loaded with a Pentium M, a configuration that we tested last year.