Dell Inspiron 700m

Summary: I've had the Dell 700m for about 7 months now (I was one of the first to get one). It is quite excellent.

I get lots of compliments on it's size and weight, and typically hear "That is the nicest screen I have ever seen on a laptop". I'm running off of a 1.6 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, 80 Gig HD, etc. Believe it or not I actually use this for my web design company, and it handles everything quite well. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and ImageReady all open at one time tends to have issues when switching between apps, but once it's focused on one application it really cranks out the speed. The keyboard is incredibly sturdy, feels as good as my old IBM Thinkpad, however the keys are a tad bit smaller than standard keyboards. No matter what anybody tells you, you will get used to it within a week. The most difficult thing about the keyboard was the ", . /" keys are only half the size of the already small other keys. But other than that, it is a joy to type on.

The screen is absolutely stunning, definitely a real eye catcher. The gloss can be distracting in areas of high sunlight and reflections, but I find that when I crank the brightness up, it appropriately quashes the problem. Very high resolution, 1280x800, widescreen, looks great when watching DVD's and nice with games too.

The Pentium M chip that it uses (up to 2.0 GHz) is the Dothan series - despite the fact that they now have the new Sonoma chipset out, still works very well. I run off the lowest end chip, the 1.6 and it still runs everything incredibly well.

The cons, the battery life is only about 2 hours with the 4 cell battery, which I think is unacceptable for a quasi-ultra portable like this. However, if you buy the optional 8-cell battery it increases it to around 5, which is plentiful. The Pentium M chip does a great job of controlling battery life. Consider getting both a 4 cell and an 8 cell on the side, as the 8-cell adds like half a pound to it's weight and protrudes out of the back.

The only other con - the graphics card! I didn't buy it to play games, but I sometimes wish I had bought another laptop when I try to play one. Although it does play most 3d games quite well (WoW, Sims, Call of Duty) just to name a few - you can definitely feel the need for some standalone graphic memory when you're doing some heavy graphic work.

Overall, it scores a 9/10 - because I like everything about this machine except for the graphics card, since 10/10 is considered "Perfect", this machine falls short of that solely because of the integrated graphics. If you're not using it for games at all - then you'll easily rate this a 10/10.