Dell Inspiron 6000 N03607R review

Over the years, Doctor Who's gone from a kindly old buffer to a jug-eared Northerner in a leather jacket, but he's still somehow remained Doctor Who.

Dell's approach to product naming works the same way - they offer laptops with a wide range of specs that are all dubbed 'Inspiron 6000'. To avoid confusion, this model has the added suffix N03607r.

It's a fairly hefty machine, but it manages to avoid Tardis levels of clunkiness by having a silver finish, and shiny white edging. At 3.3kg, though, it's too heavy to carry comfortably.

Once you've flipped the top open and fired it up, the first thing you'll notice is the excellent screen. It's 15.4in diagonally across, and has a resolution of 1,680x1050 pixels. This means that you can work with a couple of documents open side by side, or work on large images without too much scrolling around. Dell describes it as UltraSharp - we wouldn't go that far, but it's certainly a clear display with reasonably accurate colour.

The Inspiron has four speakers, which together produce impressive sound for a laptop. While you're never going to get room-shaking bass, this is streets ahead of the usual weedy stereo speakers on laptops.

MEDIA playback FEATURES

Along the front of the system are some media playback shortcut buttons: you can mute and adjust the volume, and pause, stop and skip tracks. The Dell Media Experience software has a stab at offering a Media Center-type experience, allowing you to treat the laptop as a DVD player and MP3 jukebox. In practice, it suffers from a few rough edges.

For one thing, you have to boot the laptop in Windows for it to entertain you. The Media Experience software looks slick, but a few minutes' exploration reveal some annoyances. Play a CD and you'll see an 'Import Music' button, but this won't rip the CD's tracks to your hard disk as you'd expect. It can only 'import' music files that are already on your drive, making it a bit pointless. There's no way to search for a particular track, either. There's a photo viewer, video file playback and a DVD player (a custom version of Cyberlink PowerDVD). However, these are actually outclassed by free programs like Picasa, iTunes and VLC.

PORTABLE POWERHOUSE

So with the Inspiron's hopes of being a media star dashed, let's turn our attentions to its qualities as a general-purpose laptop. Its 1.73GHz Pentium M 740 processor uses the new, faster, 'Dothan' design. This processor is coupled with the newer DDR2 variety of memory, which operates at 533MHz. Not surprisingly, then, its performance is pretty good; it achieved 83.69 in our 2D test, which means it has enough power for even demanding tasks. While some laptops are capable of playing today's games well, this isn't really one of them. The ATI Mobility Radeon X300 graphics take it to a score of 8.9 frames a second in our Doom 3 games test. You can play new games with the Dell, but only on low-detail settings.

WiFi wireless networking is included, with support for the faster 802.11g standard. Although there's an indicator light for Bluetooth, used to make PCs talk to mobile phones, Bluetooth is not in fact fitted.

Chunky, powerful laptops generally have disappointing battery life, but the Inspiron achieves an impressive 1 hour and 47 minutes in our intensive battery life test. That's the worst-case scenario, so you should get more than three hours of light use.

BUYING DECISIONS

So let's get to what you really want to know - should you buy this laptop? Well, although it has no real flaws, the Evesham Voyager C510, which won our Best Buy award in our recent May issue, beats it in all areas - apart from the speakers.