Dell's Inspiron 1420 is part of its new line of bright multi-coloured notebooks, offering eight different complexions and allowing you to be a hip and funky street icon, or something. The reality is only the exterior lid is coloured -- the illusion is shattered when you open it up and the same old silver persists across the board (now including the keys!) So the 1420 still effuses a certain "Dellness" -- that is to say, non offensive, but safely boring, much like radio stations that play the best of '70s, '80s and '90s music and have just decided to embrace the first few years of the 2000s.
Design
Apart from the aforementioned coloured lid and silver keys, there aren't any amazingly obvious departures from the normal notebook look. Build quality is excellent, and the monitor hinge can take a decent amount of punishment, happily supporting the entire weight of the notebook while we grabbed the screen and swung it around. It's not exactly IBM/Lenovo nuclear war proof, but then nothing is, and in non-fallout situations the Dell will do spectacularly.
The keys appear to have been raised slightly from the previous generation and have excellent tactile response, making typing a breeze with minimal errors. Those making the transition from a normal desktop keyboard will feel more at home here than usual. An air vent is situated on the left, meaning that most external mouse users won't get a cooked hand from the expelled heat, but that special 15 percent of the population may want to practice hovering their rodent sans sinister hand.
Features
The 1420 comes with Windows Vista preinstalled, and as of yet there's no option on the Dell Australia Web site to choose XP instead.
Our review machine arrived with a 1440x900 resolution, 14.1-inch high gloss screen, powered by an NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS video card. A Core 2 Duo T7500 CPU lent some serious grunt, while 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory is set to run all but the most insane of applications.
For DVD burning an internal 8x DVD+-RW drive is included, and for your storage needs a 160GB Western Digital hard drive does the duties. It's partitioned a bit weirdly though -- you'll lose 2.5GB to Dell Media Direct (more on this later), 10GB to a recovery drive (should disaster strike, although this is only for system files -- don't expect this to recover your documents), 71MB to tools only the PC can touch and 137GB for your own personal use.
A 2-megapixel Creative Webcam sits at the top of the screen and features zoom and pan options. Face detection is also on offer, which auto zooms and pans, as well as a bunch of crazy effects that can, for example, actively put your face on a cartoon woman's body in a bikini, apply a Phantom of the Opera style mask to one side of your head, or generate bubbles that bounce in reaction to where you are, all adjusting on the fly to match your position. The performance is average but acceptable, requiring a resolution below 640x480 to hit a good frame rate.
A smattering of multimedia keys sit at the top right, as well as the usual "Dell Media Direct" button, giving access to Dell's media centre software -- even when Windows isn't running (and hence why you lose 2GB of your hard drive to it). It is however rather inflexible, and we suggest you stick to the included Windows Media Center supplied by Vista.
Ports include an SD/MMC/MS-pro card reader on the front, two USB ports on either side, a mini firewire port, TV-Out, Express card, phone line (connected to a Connexant V.92 dial-up modem) and 100Mbit Ethernet, and finally VGA-Out. DVI out is conspicuously absent. Wireless in our review sample was the Intel 4965AGN which as the final three letters of the model reveal, is compatible with the 802.11a, g and n standards. BlueTooth 2.0 is also available for those who require it.
Performance
Disabling all the speed throttling features, we let loose with our benchmarks. Since MobileMark isn't yet Vista compatible, we resorted to a combination of 3DMark06, PCMark05 and our DVD battery drain test.
PCMark05 gave a result of 4,784, a nice score mainly thanks to the beefy CPU and good whack of RAM. 3DMark however struggled, producing a lacklustre 1,327 with the supplied GeForce 8400M video card. This will not satisfy gamers at all -- make no bones about it, this is a work laptop. Unfortunately at the time of review no option exists to select a more powerful GPU; those who want the beefier 8600 will have to migrate to the Inspiron 1520.
Things were more positive on the battery front. Setting our copy of King Kong running, the 1420 managed an impressive 3 hours and 27 minutes of battery time on its supplied nine-cell. Given that this is really not a gaming notebook, you may consider swapping out the GeForce 8400 for an Intel integrated solution and even more battery time.
In spite of our earlier whinge about air vent positioning, in testing for heat the expelled air only ever reached a slightly warm level, and the noise factor was impressively quiet as we tortured the poor thing by running wPrime, 3DMark06 and HDTach simultaneously. In fact the DVD drive makes more noise than the rest of the system put together.
The inbuilt speakers aren't completely unpleasant, and are tonally acceptable in the mid to high range. As expected they not only lack definition in the bass, but lack bass full stop. Bring your headphones. Audiophiles have the option of upgrading to an onboard Audigy card.
The Inspiron 1420 is sure to make a lot of people happy -- it manages to pack in a lot of power for a good price, and will be perfect for almost any application you choose. If you're a gamer though, look elsewhere for a more powerful video card.
