Shipping

Right off the bat I was VERY impressed with Dell’s shipping speed. I had selected free shipping, which was the economy standard 2-5 day shipping ON TOP of the time it left the factory. I ordered my 5100 on February 7th, and it wasn’t even expected to leave the factory until February 16. It arrived at my door on February 14th. This may not have much to do with the laptop itself, but goes to show that Dell certainly does have it together when it comes to their assembly line and organization.

Appearance

The laptop arrived very well packaged inside a medium sized box. Once I finally got all of the installation disks and manuals out, I finally got around to opening the plastic containing the actual laptop. It’s appearance immediately seemed maybe a little too “colorful” to me, but that’s just personal preference. It appeared very solid, without any noted parts to be moving or loose. It also seemed solid in a way that you could probably use it as a doorstop too. Yea, as I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the 5100 does weight a heafty 7.8lbs., making it quite the load to tote around from here to there. It’s dimensions, reading 10.8 x 12.9 x 1.75 don’t seem all that bad, even though it does sit a good way off the surface you’re working on. When you open the laptop up, everything seems proportionally nice, with only 2 buttons located anterior to when the screen connects to the base. One is used for Powering on and off, and the other is a reprogramable button to provide quick access programs to the application of your choice. When closed, the laptop looks smooth without any ugly protruding parts sticking out further then others.

Keyboard

The keyboard has been recently remodeled, moving some basic keys in some pretty odd places. Due to the large layout of the screen, the keyboard also seems somewhat larger then a normal laptop keyboard, making your fingers jump a pretty good distance to get to half of the keys. The “windows” key is now located in the top right corner of the keyboard, putting the “delete” key down by the “control” and arrow keys. Another vertical row has now been inserted to the right of where the "enter" key ends, which does take quite a bit of getting used to. Numerous times I’ve sworn I pressed “enter”, but instead, pressed the “Page Dn” key which is now located to the right of the “enter” key. Aside from the remodeled keyboard, the rest of the keyboard seems smooth and flawless to me. Some others have complained about a “mushy” feel to the keys, but I don’t seem to notice any such symptoms. Dell also tried something else that seems new, making an optional secondary command “numerical keypad” located slightly to the right of the home row keys. This has attempted to mimic the numerical pad on a basic keyboard, but doesn’t seem very practical considering the fact that that keys on a keyboard are staggered as opposed to the keys of a numerical pad, which are normally in vertical and horizontal uniform alignment. Aside from that, there are a few other helpful Fn functions such as brightness and volume adjustment.

Touchpad

I’ve never been a very big fan of the touchpads myself, and was very sad to see that the normal “eraser” looking trackball is no longer offered as an option on the 5100. The touchpad seems to be extremely sensitive to touch, making it equally helpful as well as a nuisance. If you ever use the touchpad, it is actually pretty easy to maneuver around, making it pretty user friendly to even the newest of laptop users. However, the problem that I seem to be having is sometimes I’ll be typing, and my wrist with briefly float across the touchpad, which then take the curser elsewhere, and then before you know it, you’re typing in a completely different place. Also, another feature allows you to double click” by quickly tapping the touchpad twice. Again, this could be used either for or against you depending on how you sit when you type. The two oversized blue keys representing the right and left mouse keys seems to click with minimal complications, and don’t really cause much or an issue. Overall though, for a touchpad, I’d say that Dell has did a decent job of designing a pretty nice mouse substitute.

Battery

The battery that was supplied for the 5100 has to be by far the single heaviest component of this computer. It accounts for probably almost 1/3-2/5 of the weight that you end up toting around. An extra battery runs right about $100 from Dell, but I didn’t see a point to getting one since I mostly use my laptop as a desktop replacement to minimize clutter and save space. The average battery life (on the regular laptop/portable power settings) was right around 3-3.75 hours. These results seem to vary quite a bit depending primarily on what you are doing during the time of battery use. Others have recorded slightly lower times, but if the screen brightness is decreased significantly, you get a pretty decent amount of power saved. Another reason for the severe power deficit is because the 5100 uses the more powerful desktop Pentium 4 model, which is indeed more powerful, but also draws a significantly larger amount of power from the battery. If maximum performance settings are preferred, you would be looking at a battery life of about 2.0-2.5 hours. There is a nifty little battery life meter that comes programmed with the 5100 that tells up to the minute numbers of battery life remaining. Even though this may be slightly below average for a laptop battery, I was kind of disappointed to see such a short charge life for even a new battery.

Ports/Jacks

This section of the computer actually had me slightly disappointed. I knew what to expect from reading other reviews of the 5100, but when I actually got the computer and started using it, it was a different story. First of all, one of the most disappointing aspects is the USB 2.0 location/spacing. They are located on the rear of the computer, and are built one over top the other. To my dismay, NOT possible to used the supplied 128MB USB memory key when anything else was plugged into the other USB, strickly because of the thickness of the memory key and/or other USB cable involved. I was hoping for at least one of the USB ports to be on either the right or left panel of the computer, but this is not so. On the back panel you will find 5 possible connections – AC power cord, 2 USB’s, LAN/Ethernet jack, 1394 Net jack, External monitor out, and an S-video out. On the right side of the computer there is only one jack, which would be your basic 56K modem jack. The left side yields 3 connections, including the single PCMCIA slot, audio out jack, and mic in jack. The CD-ROM is also located on the left side as well.

CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive

I was pretty impressed with the quality and performance of this drive. It was able to burn CDs in an average of about 4-5 minutes, and played DVD’s fluently. Any programs/games loaded into the drive played without flaw or error. Every now and then, CD’s with auto-run features would fail to load, but this could also be partially the operating systems fault. When running at fully speed, the drive just hums a somewhat audible purr. However, if it’s searching very quickly to try to find certain sectors of a disk, it can start to make a scratching sound that resembles what you might hear if someone were scratching on a screen door. The drive itself gets minimal complaints from me, and has exceeded my expectations in every way.

Performance

And now the part that everyone it waiting for! The brains and guts of the computer! Once an upgrade was done, I was VERY impressed with this laptop. Here are the different divisions that have impacted this computers performance:

Hard Drive
The standard hard drive offered with the Inspiron 5100 is a 30GB, 4200-RPM Ultra ATA drive. This was BY FAR the worst aspect of the whole system. I didn’t bother upgrading when I ordered the computer, because all of Dell’s hard drives all consisted of slow, age-old 4200-RPM hard drives (which in return makes for longer seeking times, making you wait longer on every action made). I was hoping that this 4200-RPM drive would do justice anyhow, but I very quickly found out differently. From the first moment I turned on the computer, I could not believe how SLOW this drive was. I was a little skeptical as to how they could use technology of a 4-5 year old hard drive on monster system such as this. Oddly enough, I could truthfully say that the 4.1GB hard drive on my 7-year-old ThinkPad was actually faster at loading programs then this standard 4200-RPM drive was! As I found out, my inquiries were right on the dot, and because of the hard drive, every aspect of the computer lacked in performance severely. There are no settings to change the performance of the drive, so I had no choice but to swap it out only 4 days after receiving the computer. On a side note, changing hard drives is made VERY easy by simply removing 2 screws on the bottom panel, sliding the drive out of the left side, and substituting in your new drive. I swapped it out for a Hitachi 7K60 60GB 7200-RPM hard drive (Click here to see my review of the Hitachi 7K60 7200-RPM hard drive). Performance was at least 30-50% faster, and just basic operation around windows was very “snappy”. I really don’t require near 60GB of space, but for a 7200-RPM drive, it was the only storage option available. If you are currently shopping around for a computer, I would very strongly recommend getting the cheapest drive you can, and setting aside an extra $100-200 for an upgraded hard drive OUTSIDE of Dell’s offered options. Granted you have to reload windows and all the drivers, but in my opinion, it is EVERY bit worth it.

RAM
If a computer doesn’t have RAM, it’s almost not worth your time anymore. This computer came standard with 256MB of RAM (Random Access Memory). I decided right away that I didn’t want to lack on this important aspect, and decided to go with 512MB of RAM. The computer seemingly handles very quickly, and can multi-task very easily with little effort. Moving back and forth as well as in and out of multiple running programs all at once is effortless, and the computer shows no signs of struggles. I use Winamp to play MP3’s, and it plays wonderfully through the built-in 2-channel soundcard. Even when running such programs as Winamp, the DVD player, a video game, and surfing the net (with either the LAN jack or 56K jack) all simultaneously, it continues to punch out excellent performance. By using the windows task manager provided with windows, I was able to determine that doing the most grueling tasks I could find only seems to use 70-85% of the available RAM.

Processor
Bragging an Intel Pentium 4 processor, this computer certainly bellies-up to the bar when it comes to the need for power. I don’t believe that a Celeron processor was even offered for this computer, which goes to show that Dell was very concerned with their standards of power being heightened. I believe this computer was also offered with as low as 2.6GHz, and as high as 2.8GHz. My model sported a 2.8GHz, and has proven to be more then enough power for anything I could image. As mentioned, Dell decided to go with the more powerful desktop Pentium 4, making the laptop even more powerful then many of it’s P4 laptop predecessors. Since a more powerful processor is used with the 5100, it also generates a good amount of heat, especially when doing processor heavy tasks, such as architecture and/or games requiring heavy processing and power. Because of the high heat emission, the computer comes equipped with a cooling fan that changes speeds in accordance to the temperature of the processor. It seems to do a good job of keeping the scauldering hot processor cool during it’s times of heaviest usage. However, if you ever end up doing actual “laptop” work on your lap, the computer can get a little toasty at times. Nothing you can’t handle, but it does start to warm.

Video
Dell offers 2 different choices for video memory. The standard is a 32MB Mobility ATi Radeon 7500, and the upgrade jumps you up to a doubling 64MB. I opted to go with the 64MB, mostly because I play quite a few games, and do endless amount of work on the computer, which require the computers graphics to flow smoothly. The standard display offered is a 14.1” XGA display (offering a max resolution of 1024x768). You also have the choice of upgrading to a 15.1” SXGA (1024x768), or a 15.1” SXGA+ (1400x1050) display. After having read other reviews, I’ve heard that the display is not something that you want to go skimpy on, so I went with the SXGA+. I am still very impressed with the clarity and brilliance displayed by the screen on all aspects of the color spectrum. Even when first powering up, the screen warms up very quick, making minimal color distortion/dimming evident.

Drawbacks

This computer has certainly exceeded my expectations in about every aspect I could image. However, it wouldn’t be right to go without mentioning some of the gripes that might come along with this computer as well. Here are a few of the biggest drawbacks I’ve found thus far:

Hard Drive Issues
As previously mentioned, the hard drive is a serious drawback to this computer right off the shelf. Since it only runs at 4200-RPM, it limits all of the computer’s crazy-fast options to no faster then this 4-5 year old model hard drive can keep up with. While swapping hard drives is a simple process, it still completely baffles me as to how a company such as Dell would not have addressed this issue by now.

USB location/spacing
You may not find this bothering you all that much, but as for me, it’s quite annoying. The 2 USB’s are located on the back panel (NOT conveniently on the side), and are so close to each other that using any type of USB memory key is impossible without first removing the other item plugged into the alternate USB. This complaint also leads into the next issue…

Lack of Ports/Outputs
Because there is no PS2, Serial, or Parallel port, most of your older devices are not compatible without an additional adaptor. Even if you buy an adaptor, you will find that 2 USB ports are far from enough to hook up such options as an external mouse (which is almost mandatory for desktop substitution), printer, camera, or memory key. While this gripe doesn’t apply to some who don’t really plug their laptop up to anything, others will find it annoying to have to keep unplugging and plugging in different items, even if the USB interface is friendly and quick.

Touchpad oversensitivity
As mentioned, the position of the touchpad teamed up with it’s sensitivity can cause some really annoying side effects, such as jumping all around a document when trying to type up word processing articles. You eventually grow used to it and learn to watch out for it, but it’s still something that could have been easily fixed during designing (I’d imagine).

Becomes pricey very quickly
If you’ve never shopped for a computer before, you’ll find out exactly how it is that Dell tries to reel you in. Boasting a cheap $949 price tag it all sounds wonderful, but after getting all of the standard features, as well as programs and warranties, you’ll could very easily be in the $1500’s or so. It just becomes very important to prioritize what you think is most important to you on a computer, and what you’re budget will allow.

Overview

In the end, I would say that this is an all around great computer. After doing a few upgrades that are seemingly necessary, it spins like a top. I’ve yet to see ANY blue screens of doom, and have had any mandatory reboots because of computer error. Music playback is crisp and wonderful, while the powerful Pentium 4 processor keeps the game rolling in style. It comes preloaded with all of the newest toys and gizmos that could keep you busy for weeks just trying to play with each one. Network and 56K interface and quick and smooth, making the Internet only a quick click away. Dell also offers payment plans to pre-approved customers, making a laptop very easy to fund. As a college student, I’ve found that this computer is more then perfect for my lifestyle and needs. The 5100 itself is quite a powerful machine, and backed up by its durable frame and the Dell name, it’s almost a sure buy! For anyone who doesn’t want to sacrifice power or performance for a mid-grade computer, this computer would definitely fit your needs.

Recommended:
Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 1300
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 15 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 21-30