I bought this notebook for school,and it has everything i can ask for. This is a wonderful notebook for only 650 dollars, I am so glad i didn’t waste my money on a dell latitude. I have to admit. I have been using this computer for two years and I cannot bear to part with it. I use it for everything. It is a little slower than I like, but the RAM is expandable. I have been saving money for a new Vista notebook but I definitely won’t sell this one. Overall, it is a great budget PC that could perform better but gets the job done.

The Dell Inspiron 1200 with a square black case and a bulky 14.1-inch XGA screen. It looks like a Buick next to newer notebooks, and the battery has never lasted more than a couple of hours, but I have to give it credit. In the seven years we’ve been together, my Inspiron 2500 and its sturdy keyboard have never let me down.

The Dell Inspiron 1200, one of the new breed of ultracheap notebooks, reincarnates my old faithful with a similar square black case, screen, battery life, and trusty keyboard. At $499 after a $50 instant rebate, the 1200 is a lot cheaper than my old budget buy, which cost me about $1500, if memory serves. But today, with better choices even at the $500 level, I’d pass on this Dell.

Although solidly constructed and upgradable, the Inspiron 1200 is a very basic, plain-looking unit with a small 30GB 4200-rpm hard drive, a 1.3-GHz Celeron M 350 processor, and 256MB of built-in RAM (with one empty slot for adding another DIMM). Connections are somewhat limited, though you do get ethernet and modem jacks, a VGA port, headphone and microphone mini-jacks, and one PC Card slot. Built-in Wi-Fi is not an option. It also offers three USB ports–a generous number–though they’re all inconveniently located on the back of the notebook (a design drawback the Inspiron 2500 shared).

Applications and DVD movies look fine on the 14.1-inch SVGA screen, but audio is weak and not terribly rich. The highlight of this 6.3-pound Windows XP Home-based unit (7.2-pound travel weight, including power adapter) is its right-side DVD-ROM/CD-RW combination drive for burning your own data and music CDs. Another nice extra is WordPerfect word processing software.

The 2.4-hour battery life and WorldBench 5 score of 57 is good enough for mainstream applications and short stints away from an electrical outlet. (Put in perspective, the Inspiron 1200 lags by about 40 percent the fastest notebook we’ve tested, a Micro Express CL5620 that earned a score of 97 thanks to a 2-GHz Pentium M and 512MB of RAM.) Unfortunately, the battery is an older nickel metal hydride type, which tends to wear out faster than the better-quality lithium ion batteries typically used today. A bonus: If you upgrade to a lithium ion battery ($79), you get a free 64MB Dell USB memory key.

Upshot: Upshot: You can get basic office work done and burn your own CDs with Dell’s bargain-basement Inspiron 1200. But there are nicer-looking and better-equipped $500 notebooks, namely the Acer Aspire 3003LCi or HP’s Compaq M2000.

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Dell Inspiron 1420 is easy to ajust brightness, and it comes with lots of memory (3GB) and a hearty hard drive with lots of space.The Dell Inspiron 1420 is a small package, and has lots of power. The screen is very clear, although I need me reading glasses at times, it is easy to read the majority of the time.

My test unit’s configuration was expensive for an all-purpose notebook at $1748 (as of 9/12/07), but it included a long-life battery, a 160GB hard drive, and integrated mobile broadband. Our configuration lacked the optional $50 Webcam, as well as the optional $550 Blu-ray Disc drive; the drive might have been a good complement to our machine’s high-definition, WXGA+, glossy screen, which was bright and easy to read. If you don’t like the glossy screen’s reflectiveness, you can have the screen with a non-glossy, antiglare coating for the same price.

The 6-pound 1420 is a little heavy for a notebook with only a 14.1-inch screen, but it’s very well crafted. The comfortable keyboard features mouse buttons with tactile finger ridges, and the battery has an external power gauge. Your choice from among seven optional lid colors ($50) dresses up the 1420′s standard black case. Our test unit came in a blindingly bright Alpine White. Other hues include Ruby Red, Flamingo Pink, and Spring Green.

Better at multimedia than most notebooks its size, the 1420 offers rich, medium-volume sound. The laptop also sports Dell’s standard Media Direct button, which works better than other instant-on buttons. With this button, you get direct access not only to movie, music, and photo players but also to office-application viewers, a feature that lets you check, say, an Outlook phone number or a PowerPoint slide without having to start Windows. Dell sells some reasonably priced multimedia add-ons, too, ranging from a $15 IR travel remote to a $125 TV tuner and remote package for taking full advantage of the entertainment applications in Windows Vista Home Premium (our test model’s operating system).

Performance was excellent. Our test unit’s nine-cell battery lasted nearly 5 hours. Equipped with a 2.2-GHz Core Duo T7500 processor and 2GB of RAM, the 1420 rose to the top of its class with a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 83. That score put it in a tie for first place, among currently tested all-purpose notebooks, with a similarly equipped Gateway E-475M. (Two other similarly equipped laptops earned a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 mark of 80.) Our test unit was a decent 3D game player, with an average frames-per-second rate of 42 (30 fps is considered minimally acceptable, and some notebooks manage 100 fps).

Overall this notebook has much to like. It’s fast, capable, and as colorful as you care to make it.

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If you don’t like the specifications of the particular Dell Inspiron 1525 we tested, you can easily configure your own online. That’s an important difference between this unit and most other inexpensive laptops: You can customize it down to the smallest detail–even lid color–before finally clicking the ‘Buy now’ button.

Our review unit will please those for whom good performance is a priority. Equipped with 2GB of memory and the best notebook CPU Dell offered for this model at the time of our review (a 2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7250), our $999 (as of 2/7/08) Windows Vista Home Premium machine earned a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 78. That’s 17 percent faster than the average score of 65 earned by the five under-$1000 laptops in this roundup, and even 13 percent better than the average of 69 earned by 16 recently tested all-purpose notebooks in any price range. With the battery upgraded from the standard four-cell to a six-cell ($15 extra), our notebook lasted a fairly generous 4 hours, 4 minutes on one charge, about 10 minutes longer than our five budget laptop test group’s average.

About the only thing the Inspiron 1525 can’t handle is 3D graphics; with an Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 and no dedicated video card option, it’s limited to simple games and other 2D applications.

The 1525 is wedge-shaped but svelte at 6 pounds, including a 15.4-inch 1280 by 800 resolution screen, a DVD writer, and a good keyboard. The port variety and layout is fine (the 1525 is one of the few notebooks in this price range with an HDMI connection). And like the excellent HP Pavilion dv2600se, the 1525 gives multimedia lovers lots of entertainment features: an instant-on button, a Webcam, and even dual headphone jacks. In fact, I like the Dell’s MediaDirect button more than the HP’s QuickPlay because it has Instant Office, an application viewer that lets you access your calendar, contacts and PowerPoint presentations. Also, Dell’s volume gauge is easier to use. Alas, the raspy-sounding speakers take some of the shine off the 1525′s entertainment appeal.

The real beauty of the 1525 is its customizability. For instance, our glossy screen (a no-extra-cost option at the time of our review) was pretty reflective, so you might be happier with Dell’s standard antiglare screen. From a base configuration of $500, you can build your perfect sub-$1000 laptop that includes a lid in any one of 11 different colors ($25 usually, but included in our test model’s price), Bluetooth ($20), an integrated mobile broadband card ($150), and even built-in wireless USB ($150).

If choice of features is paramount in your budget laptop, the Inspiron 1525 is your best bet among the models in our test group.

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