Dell Inspiron 4150

If you're after power and battery life, take a look at this.

Price: £1249

Manufacturer: Dell

Ratings

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Verdict

Pros:

Fast
Great battery life

Cons:
Lacks essential features

Overall: Great battery life and excellent performance mean this is an excellent notebook, and reasonably light too. But the lack of USB ports left us wanting

Mark Walsh, Personal Computer World 30 Sep 2002

Dell's Inspiron 4150 is a very powerful desktop replacement, coming with a 1.9GHz Mobile P4 processor and 256MB of DDR memory. Overall Sysmark results were impressive with a score of 162. The 4150 also comes with a mobile Radeon 7500 graphics chip, which mustered 3,395 in 3Dmark 2001.

The 4150 is smaller than the majority of Dell's notebooks and quite a bit lighter, at 2.8kg. The keyboard is excellent - as we have come to expect from Dell - with large, well spaced out keys that feel good to the touch.

Both trackpoint and touchpad options are there, and are responsive (particularly the trackpoint).

The lack of USB ports was disappointing. The fact that there is only one is inexcusable these days, as the majority of external devices use this connection. This solitary port can be found at the rear.

Next to it are serial, parallel, PS/2 and VGA connections, as well as a proprietary docking station port. On the left-hand side there are two PC Card slots, and on the right are headphone, mic, modem, Ethernet, S-Video and infra-red ports.

The notebook's major downfall is that there are only two device bays, both of which are at the front. One is taken up with a battery - albeit a removable one - so you can have either the CD-RW/DVD combo drive or the floppy drive installed at one time. This is rare for such a device and is presumably a result of its size.

Battery life is very good though, lasting two and a quarter hours in our test - more than any other Mobile Pentium 4 has managed, particularly one as fast as this.

At just over £1,450, the 4150 has a lot going for it, aside from our complaints about connectivity.

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