The Sport Utility Vehicle of laptops!
Written: Oct 12 '00 (Updated Oct 14 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: It's all that....and a bag of chips!
Cons: Heavy...and perhaps a bit unstable.
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| KickMe's Full Review: Dell Inspiron 7500 (G650YT) PC Notebook |
Not so long ago, I bought my first laptop. It was a second-hand TwinHead laptop, and I had purchased it because I had finally tired of toting the dozen or so ZipDisks and my glacially slow, printer-port driven Zip drive all over town.
I proceeded to use that laptop mercilessly, and it was burnt out within a year. The sad little thing had hardly any numbers or letters left on its keys, one of the buttons for its touch-pad had fallen off and an alarming blue stripe would frequently appear going down the center of the screen. Fortunately, a quick pinch at the top of the bezel and the stripe disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived.
One of the things I learned from my experience with the TwinHead is that swapping floppy drives and CDRoms is a drag. I also learned that 11.5 inches is too small for a screen, even if it's active matrix. This is especially true if you, like me, use your laptop as your primary computer.
Anyhoo, with the demise of my TwinHead nigh, I convinced my boss to pick me up a new computer.
I wanted a computer that wouldn't need to swap anything. I wanted a computer with lots o' HDD space and a heap of screen real estate. Really, is there any other choice but the 7X00 series by Dell?
With its huge screen, generous disk space, large n' tall keys and forward facing simultaneous CDRom and floppy drive, this medium-pizza box sized computer has just about everything you would want in a laptop. Its 3D accelerated DirectX and OpenGL video built right in allows a casual gamer to have fun with such high-powered titles as QuakeIII, Half Life, Unreal, etc.
And, wonder of wonders, that VGA jack on the back can double as a secondary monitor hookup under Win98 or Win2K. That is, you can have a monitor hooked up and displaying a completely separate desktop than the LCD screen. I connect a 15" CRT at work just for my EMail while I run all my other apps on the laptop screen.
The video in the Dell also supports the best resolution compensation I have ever seen in a laptop. Let me explain. My old twinhead, for instance, would display any video mode below its native resolution in the middle of the screen framed with a large black border. Some other laptops scale lower resolution images to full screen, but they present a very distorted appearance in the bargain. At first sight, this distortion is extreme enough to convince some less experienced users that there has been a malfunction in their computer. But not the 7500! It scaled lower resolutions cleanly and proportionally. Not only that, but it anti-aliases these images so that they appear much less jagged than you would expect. This is especially good news for the gamers among us.
The keys are almost as large as those found on a regular keyboard, albeit with a layout considerably more compact and sacrificing the numeric keypad by necessity. Type away at full speed! The tall, peaked shape of these keys guarantees that you probably won't be mashing multiples unless you are a real fudge-finger.
The unit seems very sturdy as well, although only time will tell if it can handle my abusive love. Nothing has yet fallen off or cracked.
However, there are a few downsides to this sunny side up:
First and foremost is weight. I call this the Sport Utility Vehicle of laptops for a reason. As an SUV is to regular cars, so the 7500 is to mortal laptops. This thing is over eleven pounds of heavy computing steel; and once you factor in your laptop bag, the dual 220V/110V A/C adapter and your other essentials, you may dislocate a shoulder hauling its butt around. I recommend a Targus Shuttle (a drag-behind computer bag), which is what I use. Not since I borrowed a friend's old Compaq Portable II in the eighties have I hefted such a tubby 'puter.
Second is stability. Since I got this guy, frequent shut-down problems and at least one blue screen a day have become my lot in life. So goes things. Perhaps if I go to Win2K these problems will be alleviated a bit. Yeah, right. :)
In conclusion, I must say that I recommend this to anyone looking for a desktop replacement machine who is not concerned about weight. Those who can't deal with a crash or two a day and occasional shut-down problems may want to pass, however. But, then again, such squeamish sorts may not want to run a Microsoft operating system anyway.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
KickMe
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Member: Joe Whited
Location: Utica, MI
Reviews written: 23
Trusted by: 3 members
About Me:
35 year old computer networking engineer, with a penchant for hard sf and spicy food-stuffs.
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