Inspiron 640m review

Dell's Inspiron 640m has a bright silver chassis with Apple Mac-influenced white plastic detailing. It doesn't look like a portable business notebook, but it surprised us with its all-round suitability for life on the road.

We've seen the keyboard and touch pad before on the larger Inspiron 9400, reviewed in What's New, Shopper June 2006. The keyboard doesn't flex at all, giving you a solid base on which to type. However, the keys themselves could do with being firmer. The touch pad is accurate, but again the buttons need more resistance. The front of the chassis has seven handy short cut buttons to control volume and media playback.

Pressing the last of these buttons launches the Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) interface. It's a welcome sight, letting you browse all your media files with ease. There's no TV tuner, but you could add one for around £50 and use the excellent free EPG. Dell hasn't included a remote control, either, and buying one will cost around £20. A decent-sized 80GB hard disk is fitted, which will hold a fair amount of media files.

Inside, there's a dual-core 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo T2300E. Dell fitted 1GB of RAM in this model, so it made short work of memory-intensive tasks. It's a fast notebook that can take on all but the toughest tasks. However, its integrated graphics chipset couldn't run our standard Doom 3 test, so gamers should look elsewhere.

A nice surprise is the inclusion of two batteries. The smaller one was impressive, lasting over four-and-a-half hours in our light-usage test. The larger went further still with an amazing eight hours and 25 minutes. The pair could keep working on the road, or in the garden, for a full day. This capability is backed up by the notebook's compact dimensions and relatively light weight of 2.5kg.

The 14.1" widescreen display has a high native resolution of 1,440x900 pixels. This means that there's enough desktop space for using complicated applications such as photo-manipulation packages. Image quality is great, and the display is bright and has no unusual colour tints. It passed all our usual image tests easily, but there is a slight graininess to the screen's finish that can detract from fine details.

The Inspiron 640m is a well-equipped notebook and would be equally at ease in the home or on the road. There's plenty of computing power, plus a display that gives you enough desktop space to make the most of it. It's a great notebook with a fantastic battery life and it's good value, too.