Dell Inspiron 1150

Dell's direct selling model has historically allowed the PC maker to get systems out to customers quicker and often cheaper than its direct channel counterparts. As competition in the notebook space has heated up, however, it's under more pressure than ever before to deliver the goods, especially in the budget space where everyone seems to be cutting prices to entice cash-strapped consumers. The Inspiron 1150 seems to be Dell's answer to the low-cost question, and while as with most budget notebook considerations you've got to make a few tradeoffs, the overall package is still a worthwhile one.

Design
Arguably the biggest compromise you'll have to make with the 1150 is a physical one; it's a big and bulky notebook that looks rather dated and physically ugly compared to many other notebook units. It's not over-stocked with extra features, either; what you're looking at here is a basic notebook with an ordinary 87-key keyboard, glidepad for mouse selection and power button sitting smack dab at the top middle of the 1150. There's some that will appreciate this simplicity in design, but it did have many observers wandering past our test bench wondering exactly how old this notebook was. At 3.3kg it's also not a light weight to carry around; you'll quickly feel it tugging on your arms.

Features
As with practically every Dell system, you've got a wide choice of configuration options to pick from with the 1150. At a processor level you can pick from a Mobile Pentium 4 2.8GHz (which is the option we tested) or a Celeron 2.4GHz processor; the latter option is naturally a tad cheaper. The 1150 ships with an optical drive, but it's important to decide from the outset what kind of drive you want, as it's a totally fixed drive.

The base unit ships with a 24X CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive, and you can either save yourself AU$23.10 and go for a DVD-ROM drive (although we can't quite see why you would) or add AU$299.20 to the price tag and opt for a 4x internal DVD+R/+RW burner. Our test system came with 256MB of PC2100 SDRAM, upgradeable to a maximum of 1GB. As with many budget notebooks, the graphics memory is 'shared' with the system memory (up to 64MB), although if you're after a serious graphics/game notebook, this probably isn't the unit for you in any case. The base unit ships with a very nice and very clear 14 inch XGA (1024x768) screen. Dell offers options on wireless networking, but by default the 1150 ships with a 10/100 internal NIC and 56K modem. Add in a couple of USB 2.0 ports and that's pretty much the 1150 all done.

Performance
In our testing with Bapco's MobileMark 2002, the Inspiron 1150 acquitted itself well; while its performance rating of 166 only puts it in the average category, its battery life while doing so was exceptionally good, lasting 4.8 hours in performance mode. Dropping down to the reader test, it managed a whopping six and three quarter hours, which presents us with a quandary. It's got some of the best battery life we've seen in any notebook, but it's built rather like a desktop replacement rather than a truly portable unit. Lugging around the 1150 would make one rather fit, we suspect; we're not about to extensively lug it around ourselves.

With prices starting at AU$1598 (that's for the Celeron version, mind you; our test system currently costs AU$1,798.50), the 1150 is one of the best budget notebooks on the market today. We anxiously await other vendor's responses to its low-priced challenge -- and hopefully a budget notebook price war to boot.

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