dell inspiron 8600 laptop information

If you've got the money, the Dell Inspiron 8600 (dell inspiron 8600 battery ) has solid sound, superior battery life, and thoughtful design touches.
Dell's Inspiron 8600 is a very good desktop replacement with excellent battery life and equipment options, but at times it can be daunting on selecting the configuration you want.
Pros
Superb Battery Life
Lots of Upgrade Options
Cons
Mediocre Graphics Solution
Only Two USB Ports
Description
Intel Pentium M 1.4 GHz Processor
512MB PC2700 DDR Memory
40GB Hard Drive
24x CD-RW Combo Optical Drive
15.4" WXGA (1280x800) Wide Screen LCD and NVIDIA GeForceFX Go5200 with 32MB
AC'97 Audio
v.92 56Kbps Modem, 10/100 Ethernet and Intel 802.11b Wireless
Two USB 2.0 Ports, One FireWire Port and One Type II PC Card Slot
14.2" x 10.8" x 1.5" @ 6.9 lbs.
Windows XP Home Operating System
Guide Review - Dell Inspiron 8600

This wide-screen laptop is packed with conveniences, boasts a very good battery life such like the digital camera battery , and has multimedia chops. But at $2840 it's expensive, and at least one competitor is a tad faster.

The 8600's all-too-rare press-and-check external power gauge saves you from having to turn on the notebook just to check battery life. That said, you shouldn't have to check too often: The 8600 gave us a generous 4.5 hours in our tests.

Need even more battery life, or more internal storage? You can pop out the 8600's DVD burner and insert an additional battery ($99 extra), or a second hard drive ($249) to expand the unit's 60GB storage by another 40GB. Thanks to the 8600's spring-loaded side release, you can make the swap using one hand.

With a strong set of speakers built into the front of the case and dedicated audio buttons, the 8600 makes a good stand-alone CD player. The volume controls, located at the top of the keyboard, are cleverly designed with rounded, concave surfaces. Separate CD control buttons run down the right side of the keyboard.

If you like a keyboard with a springy feel, the 8600's will please you , the same as your digital camera battery. It lacks extras such as a scrolling button and application launchers, and we found that we sometimes hit the audio buttons when we wanted to hit the nearby Page Up or Page Down key. But the rest of the layout is fine, and we found typing easy overall.

Our review unit came with a 15.4-inch screen and a whopping 1920-by-1200-pixel native resolution, excellent for doing graphics work, opening multiple windows, or cramming huge spreadsheets onto the screen.

Dell sells just one choice of docking station for the 8600, the $169, 1.7-pound Advanced Port Replicator. As the name suggests, it's not much more than a convenient place to plug in your peripherals; however, it provides two additional USB ports and a DVI port, which is useful for connecting the notebook to a flat-panel monitor.

The 8600 comes equipped with Intel's 2-GHz/400-MHz Pentium M 755 chip--the fastest mobile processor available today--and 1024MB of RAM. Although it earned a WorldBench 5 score of 90 in our speed tests, one of the highest marks we've recorded, another laptop we tested this month with the same configuration, the $2499 Polywell PolyNote 3015AW, scored even higher, at 98. However, the 8600 should be plenty fast enough for any application. An excellent printed manual and the Corel WordPerfect Productivity Pack top it all off.

Dell's Inspiron 8600 looks very much like the 8500 and that is no accident. The 8600 ( dell inspiron 8600 battery )is essentially an upgrade of the 8500 to use the new Intel Pentium M CPU. This gives the 8600 a big advantage over the 8500 and other desktop replacements because of its very long battery life.

Overall system performance is very good with the Pentium M 1.4 GHz CPU. This performs roughly between a Pentium 4 2.4 and 2.6 GHz desktop processor. This means computing will be slower than most desktop replacements with high end Pentium 4 processor, but the power savings allow the 8600 to last sometimes more that twice as long on a single battery charge.

Graphics are headlined by a 15.4" wide screen LCD display with a very good viewing angle. The low end versions of the 8600 come equipped with an NVIDIA GeForceFX Go5200 video processor with 32MB of memory. While it is DirectX 9 compatible, the performance is very lacking when it comes to running 3D games, particularly with the low memory. There is an option for the ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility which offers excellent performance, but it costs more.

Probably the biggest problem with the 8600 (dell inspiron 8600 battery )is the expansion capabilities. Most desktop replacements offer 3 USB 2.0 ports and some even 4. With the huge number of USB devices available, it is a shame that there are only 2 USB ports on the 8600.

So in the end, the Dell Inspiron 8600 is a very good computer if you are willing to wade through the customize options and can live with only two USB ports.