Dell's new Inspiron 4150 combines a carefully planned feature set with plenty of power.

This notebook is a good match for people who travel and can't afford to leave anything behind, and it has a size and a weight that won't seem too inconvenient.

Dressed for success
Two-tone color schemes must be back in style--for notebooks at least, if not for cars or shoes. The Inspiron 4150's charcoal-gray case comes with a big, silver patch on the lid and silver wrist rests below the keyboard. For AU$64.90, you can order replacement highlights in Black Leather, Iridescent Jade, Burlwood, Birch Blue, or Robin's Egg Red (apparently, robins in Texas lay unusually colored eggs). But if you want your Inspiron 4150 in one color, you're out of luck.

Color coordination aside, the 4150 has a handsome presence. The 31.75cm-wide and 25.4cm-deep case bulges slightly along the sides to give an aerodynamic look. This Dell stands at just over 4cm tall and weighs 2.85kg (3.35kg with the AC supply). These specs hardly make this laptop the smallest or the lightest in its class; for example, the competing IBM ThinkPad T-series models weigh 2.58kg with the same type of optical drive. Nevertheless, the Inspiron 4150 is still highly portable.

Pentium 4 and more
ZDNet evaluated a loaded Inspiron 4150 configuration: a 1.9GHz Pentium 4-M with 256MB of DDR SDRAM. The minimum configuration Dell sells locally now only comes with 384MB of DDR SDRAM. The 4150 comes with a 40GB drive that spins at 5,400rpm (you can save AU$108.90 by getting a 30GB drive), and an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics controller with 32MB of its own memory. Like most thin-and-lights, the Inspiron 4150 is a two- spindle system--counting the hard drive--which means that you don't get an internal floppy and optical drive -- it's one or the other. Our test system had a rather nice combo DVD/CD-RW drive. Altogether, the package we looked at costs AU$4,563.90.

Dell may have packed too many pixels into our test system's 14.1-inch display. The default resolution was 1,400x1,050 pixels, or super-XGA. The display looks nice and crisp, but at that resolution, text still appears very crowded. You can save AU$97.90 by stepping down to a more realistic 1,024x768. The Inspiron 4150 played DVDs smoothly even at full screen; it rendered intense blues and greens but looked a bit flat on reds and yellows.

The 4150 has the standard communications and expansion options for a thin-and-light. These include a 56Kbps modem, wired Ethernet, integrated Wi-Fi wireless networking, and infrared. There are two Type II PC Card slots but only one USB port. The keyboard is quiet, and the keys don't wiggle a bit, though the entire keypad sags a little when typing. You can take your pick between a pointing stick and a touchpad with two sets of left- and right-click buttons. Our only complaint about the Inspiron 4150's hands-on experience is that the G, H, and B keys surround the pointing stick very tightly, leaving little room for error.

Thin-and-fast
In ZDNet Labs' tests, the Inspiron 4150 outperformed similarly equipped notebooks from HP and IBM. Not for the first time, we note that factors besides processor clock speed have a big impact on overall applications performance. For example, the Inspiron 4150 scored about 11 percent better than the HP Pavilion zt1290, which has the same processor and twice the memory; perhaps the Dell's speedy hard drive contributed to that victory. The Inspiron 4150 scored only 4 percent better than IBM's ThinkPad T30, which sports a slightly slower 1.8GHz processor but has a 5,400rpm hard drive. All three systems were running Microsoft Windows XP.

Pentium 4-M processors and 5,400rpm hard drives suck up a lot of power, so we expected poor battery life for the Inspiron 4150. But its 4,460mAh cell proved respectable, drying up only 10 minutes shy of the 3-hour mark. The zt1290 conked out at 2 hours, 31 minutes, and the ThinkPad T30 gave in at an impractical 2 hours, 6 minutes. Furthermore, when the Inspiron 4150's battery is running low and there's no power outlet in sight, you can pop a second, full- sized AU$217.80 battery into the bay that normally holds the optical drive.

Dell Inspiron 4150 1.9GHz
Company: Dell Australia
Price: AU$4,563.90
Phone: 1800 812 393

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