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Dell Inspiron 1100 Review
Inspiron 1100 belongs to the group of refurbished laptops models that is still manufactured and can also be bought as new (currently available as 1150 that is slightly modified version of its predecessor).
Great laptop for great price. I changed my notebook to refurbished Inspiron 1100 laptop (Celeron 2GHz, 384MB RAM, 20GB HDD, CD-RW) 6 months ago and I consider it a very good choice. But what makes me even happier is that it is also one of the cheapest I've ever bought.
As many laboratory comparison tests showed, Inspiron 1100 has the higher performance and the longest battery life among 2GHz Celeron based products.
Inspiron 1100 was manufactured with two kinds of batteries - 8-cell 4300mAh and 12-cell 6450mAh. If you don't use drives extensively you can work for 4 hours on the 12-cell battery. This result is far better than its direct competitors' and really impressive for standard, desktop processor based system. In fact, it beats even some Intel Pentium Mobile laptops that are known from their low power consumption.
You can meet Inspiron 1100 laptops with either Intel Celeron or Intel Pentium 4, 2GHz to 2.4GHz processors, with Celeron being more popular because of its lower price. In fact, except lower price, Celeron has one more advantage. It needs less power as it has 4 times less L2 cache memory (128kB) that is the most power consuming part of every CPU. Celeron systems tend to have longer battery life. They are also quieter because of more rarely working fan. However, in some applications their performance is smaller than for Pentium 4.
The cooling system is based on passive heat sinks and variable speed fan. The big fan is placed on the bottom side of casing. Additionally, big heat sink is placed on the backside, what gives far better airflow and cooling than in bottom side only systems. Cooling is very effective in Inspiron 1100. The fan works constantly, but during normal work it is so quiet that you can hardly hear it. I thought for a long time that it doesn't work at all. However, if you start to use processor extensively, like for example during compressing big amount of data or compiling bigger program, it starts to work faster and become really noisy.
Dell Inspiron 1100 has only one removable storage drive. It can be CD-ROM, DVD, CD-RW or DVD/CD-RW combo drive. The most common options you will find looking for refurbished Inspiron 1100 models is CD-ROM or DVD. Unfortunately, there is no universal Media Bay and drives from Dell Latitude laptops don't fit in Inspiron.
Keyboard and TouchPad are other strong points of this laptop. Keyboard is full size, solid and comfortable. It has distinct threshold but it is not stiff. TouchPad is big, with big, comfortable buttons. You can adjust many touchpad parameters like touch sensitivity and palm sensitivity using Synaptics control software.
You can find Inspiron 1100 laptops with two display sizes: 14.1" and 15". Both displays features maximum resolution of 1024 x 768. They are bright and clear, with wide brightness regulation range.
Sound from two front-side stereo speakers is surprisingly good and loud enough to watch movies or listen to the music comfortably.
You can easily see that Inspiron 1100 is a budget system, when looking on its expansion capabilities. It lacks parallel and serial port, what probably wouldn't be important for most users. But only two USB 2.0 and one PC Card slot may sometimes be a serious problem. Additionally, there is no PS/2 port, so you have to use USB mouse, what leaves you with only 1 USB port. If you connect a printer, both ports are busy. Inspiron 1100 doesn't have wireless LAN card neither build-in antenna for mini-PCI card. The only solution for wireless network is PC Card wireless LAN.
As you can see Inspiron 1100 expansion capabilities are only to fit typical configuration (laptop + USB mouse + USB printer + PC Card wireless LAN). However, this should suffice for great majority of users. For those who would like to watch movies on a bigger screen, there is a Video-Out port supporting both S-Video and Composite (with adapter) standards.
You can be sure that with Inspiron 1100 savings are not at the expense of quality. As always, Dell gives you top quality product with top quality mechanics and electronics. Casing, keyboard, touchpad - everything is solid and durable. I'm sure it is the best laptop for this price and the best price for such laptop, especially when you decide to buy refurbished one. You can find many refurbished Inspirons 1100 on Dell site within their Outlet section. There are also plenty of them on eBay.
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