The Inspiron line of notebooks is touted by Dell to be desktop replacements; and in a moment, you'll see exactly why this claim is justified.

This notebook has all the ports you'll ever need (right now, that is...). And it is perfectly capable of functioning as a single unit without any need for you to lug around extra cables. Considering how much this laptop weighs (a bit heavier than 3kgs), that's a good thing!

On the front, there are two removable bays for you to swap parts like batteries, floppy drives, CD-RW drives, etc... One of them must always hold your battery because there is no other place to put it.

On the right side of the laptop, you will find the integrated 100Mbps network port and 56K modem. The infra-red port (the big black eye) sits in the middle, beneath the hard disk.

On the far right are the usual two PC-Card Type II slots. And below them are the FireWire (IEEE 1394) port and the Mic In, Line Out, Line In jacks. The inclusion of a FireWire port means you can do video editing on the notebook, just like the more expensive (albeit classier) Sony Vaios.

On the rear end, there's a PS/2 port which works for a keyboard or a mouse, a monitor jack, the docking station port, a parallel port, a serial port and two (!) USB ports. This is also the first laptop which I've seen that has two fans for cooling!

In order to save power, the fans are disabled initially and then turned on when the temperature reaches a certain level. If the notebook is moderately hot, one of the fans will start running first (the one on the right). Then, if your system gets even hotter, the second fan will also start up. During normal use, I've only seen one fan start up after a while. But ten minutes after I start playing Emperor, both fans start revving up! Due to the extra heat output of the GeForce2 Go, I guess. ;)

The left side contains a fixed bay (it's harder to remove what's inside). In my system, an 8X Toshiba DVD drive sits inside it. Next to it is the composite video-out socket which can be either plugged into an S-Video cable or the supplied video-out dongle to be connected to the usual 'yellow plug' for composite video.

The keyboard is a "full-sized" keyboard with all the necessary keys present, unlike some laptop keyboards where, in order to save space, they take out some keys deemed non-essential like the Insert, Delete, End keys, etc, etc. The keys have good travel distance so you can tell whether you've typed something or not. Although it'll start beeping key conflicts after only 3 or 4 keys are pressed together, this should not be a problem for very good touch typists.

An interesting thing to note is that the Dell's Inspiron and Latitude lines of laptops have both a trackpoint (the 'pencil eraser') and a touch-pad pointing device.

I don't quite like the fact that the keyboard is so far inside the laptop. This caused my wrists to be easily strained because they are pressed on the not-at-all-soft or useful wrist pads. I have a feeling if I'm going to get the carpal tunnel syndrome, it'll probably be due to this. ;)

Okay, now let's get to the numbers!