Great machine with a few reservations
Written: Oct 25 '99
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Pros: Video output, cost, speed, tech support
Cons: Not ACPI compatible, minor DVD problems
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| jtigani's Full Review: Dell Inspiron 3500 A366GT |
The Inspiron 3500's one big negative in my opinion is that it is not ACPI compatible. For those aren't familiar with ACPI, its a new power management technology that can lengthen battery life and allow your computer to do cool things like slow down the processor when it gets too hot or wake up the machine when you receive a fax.
Many of these functions are built into lots of machines, especially laptops (i.e. APM), but they are all implemented in the BIOS, which is a clumsy and inefficient place to do power management. So what does this mean? It means that if you standby or hibernate your machine it might not come back. In fact this morning my I-3500 refused to wake up from standby. It also means that while still you have control over things like when to spin down the hard drive, you don't benefit from the operating system being able to make the decisions on its own.
In addition, ACPI has a finer timer resolution so it can improve the performance of multimedia and games.
I hope I haven't gone into too much detail about this ... ACPI is a technology that isn't very well known right now but pretty soon will become the standard.
The other negative experience I had with my I-3500 was the fact that the DVD MPEG2 decoder gave me headaches -- and it still plays some dvd's poorly even after multiple tech support calls & driver updates. I also found the keyboard layout hard to get used to -- for a while I would type and my right hand would be shifted over by one key ... someone else using the machine said they experienced the same problem.
But in order to give the machine fair treatment, I should say that the video is great ... its got a huge vibrant screen with excellent contrast. It only takes about 3 seconds for the bios to boot (i.e to get to the osloader -- many desktops with add-in hardware will take time in the order of minutes to get this far).
I bought the machine because DELL is a solid company... a hint on buying laptops is that it is invariably better to go with a big established company like DELL ... there are too many possible issues with motherboards & bioses to trust someone smaller. For a company like DELL, Microsoft will very hard to test, diagnose, and fix hardware and firmware issues, while a smaller company may not even get enough test cycles to find the problem.
So I'd recommend the I-7000 or the Dell dimension or Lattitude series over the 3500.
Also ... Dell's tech support is terrific but I found it hard to find the right number to call ... maybe the reason it was so good is that most people gave up before calling the right number.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 3000
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium II
Processor speed: 301-400
Screen Size: 14"
RAM: 96
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 9-12
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Epinions.com ID:
jtigani
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Member: jordan tigani
Location: Seattle, WA
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
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