Dell Inspiron 500M

Intel's Centrino technology promises longer battery life, and the new Dell Inspiron 500m, a "pure" Centrino thin-and-light for the home user, keeps this promise. The configuration that CNET Labs tested ran for 3.5 hours on its relatively small battery--not stunning by Pentium M standards, but still it's respectable. And although the Inspiron 500m (little sibling to the Inspiron 600m) is unspectacular in other ways, it's nevertheless an affordable, well-crafted thin-and-light. If you don't want to invest a fortune in your notebook and can live with some of the trade-offs, the Inspiron 500m delivers plenty of working time and adequate performance in a comfortable, capable, Wi-Fi-equipped package.The Inspiron 500m has an understated look, with discreetly rounded edges and a 12.25-by-10.25-by-1.5-inch footprint that's neither ostentatiously big nor post-modern tiny. The 5.4-pound base weight is also acceptable, and it's right in range for that of a thin-and-light. The front edge has no features at all other than the lid latch, while the right side houses only an optical bay holding a plain-Jane DVD-ROM drive. (Stereo speakers hide behind the front edge and produce average sound for a notebook.) For $120 more, the media bay can also hold a DVD/CD-RW drive; a second battery for the bay costs $129.

The left edge has just a solitary Type II PC Card slot, an infrared port, and two audio jacks. The back edge is more crowded, with two USB 2.0 ports; a port each for S-Video, modem and Ethernet, parallel and monitor; and even a serial port. The model that we tested had no floppy drive and no writable-media drive, so backup capabilities are restricted to a USB keychain or an external USB drive, unless you spring for the DVD/CD-RW drive.

	BAPCo MobileMark2002 performance rating

Dell Inspiron 600m 169

IBM ThinkPad X31 143

Dell Inspiron 500m 138

Find out more about how we test notebooks.

System configurations:

Dell Inspiron 500m
Windows XP Home; 1.4GHz Intel Pentium M; 256MB DDR SDRAM 266MHz; Intel 82852/82855 Graphics Controller-0 (up to 64MB-shared); Hitachi DK23EA-30 30GB 4,200rpm

Dell Inspiron 600m
Windows XP Home; 1.6GHz Intel Pentium M; 512MB DDR SDRAM 266MHz; ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB; IBM Travelstar 40GN 40GB 5,400rpm

IBM ThinkPad X31
Windows XP Home; 1.4GHz Intel Pentium M; 256MB DDR SDRAM 266MHz; ATI Mobility Radeon 16MB; Hitachi DK23EB-40 40GB 5,400rpm The Inspiron 500m scored about average for a Pentium M-based system, but it can't compete with the IBM ThinkPad X31's four-and-a-half-hour battery life. The gap is strange, because both systems have the same-speed processor and have comparable battery specs--1.1V, 4,320mAh for the Inspiron 500m and 10.8V, 4,400mAh for the ThinkPad X31. Don't get us wrong--a battery life of nearly three and a half hours is great, but by all accounts, it should have been higher.

Battery life  (Longer bars indicate better performance) BAPCo MobileMark2002 battery life in minutes

IBM ThinkPad X31 270  Dell Inspiron 500m 208  Dell Inspiron 600m 201

To measure mobile application performance and battery life, CNET Labs uses BAPCo's MobileMark2002. MobileMark measures both application performance and battery life concurrently using a number of popular applications (Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Netscape Communicator 6.0, WinZip Computing WinZip 8.0, McAfee VirusScan 5.13, Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1, and Macromedia Flash 5.0).

System configurations:

Dell Inspiron 500m
Windows XP Home; 1.4GHz Intel Pentium M; 256MB DDR SDRAM 266MHz; Intel 82852/82855 Graphics Controller-0 (up to 64MB-shared); Hitachi DK23EA-30 30GB 4,200rpm

Dell Inspiron 600m
Windows XP Home; 1.6GHz Intel Pentium M; 512MB DDR SDRAM 266MHz; ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB; IBM Travelstar 40GN 40GB 5,400rpm

IBM ThinkPad X31
Windows XP Home; 1.4GHz Intel Pentium M; 256MB DDR SDRAM 266MHz; ATI Mobility Radeon 16MB; Hitachi DK23EB-40 40GB 5,400rpm The Inspiron 500m's warranty lasts for only one year, which is about on a par for the industry these days but not enough to keep you from worrying. You can extend it to three years for a hefty $169. Tech support, fortunately, isn't tied to the warranty: Dell provides free, toll-free, live-human support 24/7 for as long as you own the system.

This notebook also comes with a thorough printed manual and extensive onscreen help files; on Dell's Web site you can contact technicians, download driver updates and documentation, and search FAQs and knowledge bases. The company's fairly generous policy on defective LCDs considers five bad pixels to be too many. Hide Review