Dell Inspiron 6400 review

Buying a cheaper notebook usually means making sacrifices, but Dell's Inspiron 6400 has few compromises and some surprises.

First, there's the 15.4" widescreen display. The quality and size of a notebook's display is key to an enjoyable experience, so we were most pleased to discover that the Inspiron's display has a massive 1,680x1,050 resolution. This gives you approximately 70 per cent more desktop space than the more common 1,280x800 version, making it ideal for those who use two applications at once or work on large spreadsheets.

The quality of the display isn't perfect, though. It has a slight graininess across the entire screen, which detracts a little from the fine detail it can display. It has a gloss coating to increase contrast, though, and our colour and greyscale tests looked good, so it will suit movie fans and digital photographers.

With that in mind Dell has included a memory card reader that supports all the usual formats and even xD. There are also four USB2 ports provided for connecting peripherals. The usual wired and wireless networking options are enhanced by the addition of Bluetooth for connecting mobile phones, PDAs and other peripherals.

The keyboard is a good size, but the keys could be a little firmer. The touch pad is large and accurate, with handy scroll areas on the bottom and right-hand side. Unfortunately, Dell has put large and spongy buttons below the touch pad that have no distinct action or feedback. The front of the chassis has a set of media playback buttons, which nestle between a pair of loud and capable speakers.

The Inspiron performed well thanks to an Intel Core Duo T2300 processor. The processor's two cores provide excellent performance in compatible applications, allowing it to hurtle through our video-encoding test with a score of 156. The notebook has only 512MB of RAM, so it didn't fare quite so well in our photo-manipulation test. An overall score of 102 is very respectable for a notebook at this price, however.

The notebook lasted an excellent four hours and 18 minutes in our light-use test, which is perfect for computing on the move or simply spending an afternoon in the garden. At almost 3kg it isn't the lightest notebook to carry around, though.

The 6400 really impressed us, as we didn't think it possible to get a high-resolution display and an Intel Core Duo processor for under £700. There are a couple of minor issues with the display and keyboard, but this notebook is a real bargain with plenty to offer. Make sure you use the E-Value code (left) to get the correct specification when ordering.