- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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3.0 stars
"Got mine for free..."
Pros: The keyboard has a nice feel, the screen is clear, easy on the eye, 1024x768, the 2GHz CPU and 1GB RAM is enough grunt for most office and web surfing activities. 802.11g networking with WPA2 allows it to participate in my home and work networks.
Cons: Flimsy case design, this allowed the power supply PCB to detach, hence why I got it for nothing, it was technically dead. The HDD is very slow and noisy, the CPU gets quite hot, the lid is flimsy, battery life of about an hour. No USB2 or firewire.
Summary: I got this laptop for nothing, a friend had it for a few years, then one day he was handing it over to someone else and it died. I also got the carry case, manuals, discs and USB floppy drive.
The reason why the laptop had died, he had flexed the chassis, which in turn, had popped apart the connector from power supply board from the main PCB. I took the laptop apart pushed the two parts together.
It is a distinct weakness in the design of this laptop that it suffers from lack of structural rigidity. I have a Dell XPS M1730, I can lift that from any corner without a hint of any bending or warping. The Inspiron 9300 I had before that was just as rigid.
I'm running XP Pro SP3 on it with Office 2003 and its fine. I upgraded the RAM from 256MB to 1GB and the 802.11b to 802.11g via the mini-PCI slot. I sometimes watch 4:3 movies streamed off the server or via the DVD drive.
Its been used on and off for about 7 years now, the battery is starting to give up, the onboard CMOS battery is dead and the hard drive is painfully slow.
When I get suitably bored, I'll change the CMOS battery and HDD and stick Windows 7 x32 RC1 on it ;) A new battery is around £38 and will give around 4 hours (higher capacity than the original)
I've got a Mini 9, but I really want a bit more screen real estate...
