Review: Dell Inspiron 6000

I am from finance stream, I use my pc for heavy duty multimedia like encoding movies and music. Playing some power hungry games. Watching movie in a small window and using Photoshop at same time when a boring scene comes

So I started to look for a desktop replacement notebook. I checked many notebooks like Sony viao, Compaq, IBM, Toshiba Satellite & Dell. Sony was way too expensive standing at more than RS.1 lakh (US $ 2300) . And moreover my uncle has a viao, and its sound is awful. Don’t know whether it’s his notebook problem or a standard Sony problem.

Compaq didn’t have the features I wanted in the models currently available in India. IBM was more catering to business users and less to multimedia. And moreover as IBM sold its business to lennovo, I was not too keen on getting an IBM. That left me with 2 brands, Toshiba Satellite M30X-155 & Dell Inspiron 6000. The cost was more or less the same. With Toshiba standing at Rs. 69,000 (US $ 1,650) and Dell Inspiron at Rs. 74,000 (US $ 1,750). Dell offered me more features for extra Rs.5000 like 80 GB HDD, 533 MHz FSB & RAM, 5 ½ hours Battery, PCI Express graphics & inbuilt wifi compared to 40 GB HDD, 400 MHz FSB & RAM, 4 hours battery, AGP graphics and no inbuilt wifi.

So I finalized Dell Inspiron 6000 with the following config:
• 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium M 730 (Sonoma), 533MHz FSB and PCIe x16 chipset
• 15.4 inch WXGA+ LCD Panel (Samsung)
• 512 MB DDR2 533 MHz ram
• 80 GB Ultra ATA Fujitsu 5400 rpm HDD
• 64 MB ATI Mobility Radeon X300
• Microsoft Windows XP Home
• 8x DVD writer (NEC)
• Intel 2200 b/g internal wireless card
• 9-cell lithium ion battery
• 4 USB ports
• 1 IEEE 1394 FireWire port
• Secure Digital I/O card slot
• 1 PCMCIA card slot
• 2 front facing speakers
• VGA output
• Optional S-Video and composite video out with adaptor cable
• Audio-out (headphones) and Mic-in
• Integrated 10/100 network Ethernet card
• Internal 56k modem
• 1 year on-site service warranty

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Pre-Buying Experience:

Dell customer service guys were very polite and helpful before placing order. The guys there explained me in detail which hardware is best for my needs. And helped me customize my notebook.

Post-Order Experience:

It was horrible . They took more than 20 days to deliver my notebook. Although on deed it was mentioned that it will take 21 days, the dell guys had promised me a 12 day delivery. And worse part was it was lying in Mumbai customs for a week. And I following up with dell guys like mad, and used to get diff answers every time . I though I had made a huge mistake for buying dell. And I had given a different address outside city limits to save Rs.5000 on excise . And to my shock one fine morning I got a call on my cell for courier guys telling me that they are outside my address and no one is opening door. I told them that I am out, and they should have informed me in advance that they are coming. But the courier guy was very nice & he told no problem, he will wait for me . I called my best friend for company & took my car and rushed there. It still took 1 hour to reach . And when I finally reached, the guy was waiting for me. I took him to the house, checked the papers & accepted the box. It was a huge brown box, but surprisingly very light. I was like “is the laptop inside??”. Now I was very eager to reach back home & lay my hands on the new toy. But to my agony, I got a call from dell on my mobile & they told me not to open the seal, their engineer will come tomorrow and start the machine.

Form & Design:

As soon the engineer came next day early morning, I took out the machine from the packaging, and was like WOW……..!! I had never seen such a cool looking notebook in my life. I had used Sony, Toshiba, IBM, Dell, and Compaq in my office, but all of them looked ugly. This was a very cool looking laptop & if there ever was a beauty contest for laptops, it would win easily.

The notebook looked sturdy and well built. And the best part was, the interior is devoid of any advertising stickers except two small Windows XP and Intel Centrino logos, and thus feels clean. All others I have used were full of big stickers on both sides of touchpad, which came off partly after a few months making the laptop looking bad.

The box had manuals, windows xp home CD, drivers, and few applications CDs. They included a nylon bag which was great and the adapter was very small. Its breadth and thickness are 10''x1.75'', Length at 14''.

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Screen

Inspiron 6000 comes standard with a 15.4'' XGA (1280x800) screen. The screen is not XBrite or TruBright as some other notebooks have but it is bright enough for in-house use. However for wide angles its looks bad. So for seeing a movie, one has to sit opposite the laptop.


Speakers

Speakers are placed on the left and right side of the front edge, with standard control buttons in the middle, and that lets music on even while the lid is closed. The placement of speakers coincides exactly with hands when you use laptop, which obstructs the sound. However the quality of speakers is excellent. Never ever came across such a great quality of sound output in notebooks. I have an external creative blaster audigy2 7.1 sound card and 5.1 speakers. But I don’t need to use it in my notebook. The inbuilt are powerful enough.

Processor and Performance

The notebook came loaded with a lot of softwares. And there was no partition, full 80 GB single drive. I immediately uninstalled all the softwares & used partition magic to organize the drive better. Post that, the notebook booted up very fast. I installed a lot of programmes, and still I get a boot up time of less than a minute, which is excellent.

It’s said that a 1.6GHz Pentium M with Centrino specification performs as good as a regular 2.4GHz P4. I fully agree, it’s very fast. The videos get encoded real fast. I encoded 4 VCDs in a DVD format using Nero and my old P4 which used to get the job done in 9 hours, this baby did it in 3 ½ hours. The DVDs play extremely smooth on it. No jerks whatsoever. I have tested a few games like Cricket 2005, NFS Underground, Doom 3, and all run smoothly with the highest settings. Something I never dreamt of getting in a notebook PC.

Keyboard and Touch pad
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Keyboard is good, and the keys are firm and give a nice response to touch. Better than Sony viao. But still I feel that the keyboard of IBM is the best. However, by no means dell is not good. The best part was the keys were large and properly placed for comfort. A big problem here was even with the numlock key on, one had to keep the function key held to use numbers on alphabets. That’s ridiculous. It’s the most problematic when u use numbers. Even though now I am used to using the regular numbers in a ling. But still that’s the major drawback.
The Touchpad, on the other hand, is a lot better in terms of functionality even though it feels a little rough. It supports vertical and horizontal scrolling. It also lets you assign applications that can be run automatically upon tapping the corners of the touch pad. However I am not too comfortable using a touchpad on any notebook, so I got a cordless optical mouse of Logitech.

Input and Output Ports

This notebook comes with a nice set of I/O ports: 1 PCMCIA, 1 SD Card slot, Mic, Headphone, 2 USB, and 1 FireWire (IEEE 1394) on the right, 10/100 Ethernet, Modem, 2 USB, S-Video, VGA, and Power socket on the back, and a DVD drive and a Kensington Lock slot on the left.

An integrated mic is missing, and that’s surprising.

Left side of Dell Inspiron 6000
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Back side of Dell Inspiron 6000
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Right side of Dell Inspiron 6000
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Front side of Dell Inspiron 6000
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Wireless

My notebook has the basic Wi-Fi capability that comes with Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 (802.11b/g). I have a Netgear wireless router, and my cable net works absolutely fine.

Other wireless protocols such as 802.11a and Bluetooth are available for additional cost, but I didn't need them, as in India net speeds being so less, a higher wifi would be practically useless and I already had a blue tooth dongle, so there was no need of an inbuilt one.

Battery

The best part of the notebook is its battery life. Believe it or not, its more than 5 ½ hours on a single charge wit a 9 cell battery. I could watch entire lord of the rings part 1 and still had nearly 1 ½ hours of battery left. And without multimedia use, when I was doing my accounts n finance work using excel, I got more than 5 ½ hours. Amazing. A nice feature was on back of notebook, the battery had an indicator, so even with the machine off, once could just press the button on battery & see much charge is left.

Operating System and Software

I got winxp home, Norton antivirus 2005 (trial), cyber link power DVD, sonic DVD/ cd writing software, dell media experience. All these were preinstalled. And all the CDs were shipped also. I uninstalled all except win xp and dell media experience.

Customer Support

Pre buying, I got an excellent feedback from dell guys (obviously). Once I made payment, they were horrible in cooperation. I though if at all I had a problem with the machine, it would be extremely difficult to get the problem solved.

But Dell again proved me wrong. After a use of few months, the panel started to get dark patches on sides. I called up dell asking for some stickers which can be placed to hide. And dell replaced the entire body free of cost. Very good service I must say.

Complaints

Viewing screen from wide angles is not a pleasure.
The base gets heated up, so it’s not too comfortable sitting too long with it on lap.
DVD drive is very noisy.
Heavy at more than 3 Kgs, and with bag it’s more than 4 ½ Kgs. Which makes it impossible to carry on shoulders for long time.

Conclusion

The performance of this baby was far beyond my expectations. It’s more affordable than most notebooks having similar config. And baring a few shortcomings, it’s indeed a very good notebook to buy.

It’s definitely a complete desktop replacement. And with the features, performance, good customer support, nice warranty, its perfect.

And now with dell coming up with Celeron m processors for it, even the users with lesser budget can get it. However the performance will definitely be less with Celeron compared to a Pentium processor I have.

Wow . wht a gr8 Review Mr.Notty really loved to read it and good details :)

Good .. Detailed review for Dell Inspiron 6000 i was searching for it

Good review friend

Mr. Notty is there own review ?
from your IP it revels you are one of the banned members who wanted to screw techarena (cause they were removed from techarena in past)
like mask, deejay etc.

nice review....i wish i had one

great review n nice pics too

Great Review Mr.notty

Good Review I Must Say...

Nice & Detailed Review...

NICE N DETAILED REVIEW...GREAT WORK DONE THERE MY MAN :cool: