Carla Thornton

Dell Inspiron 8200

The Inspiron 8200's DVD-ROM/CD-RW combination drive is fixed and its floppy drive (located on the front) is modular, instead of the other way around. This approach lets you have two drives (for example, a Zip drive or another hard drive) in the notebook at once. Optionally, you can slap in an extra battery, useful for extralong work sessions away from an outlet. Designed to please both pointing-device camps, the Inspiron 8200 includes a touchpad and an eraserhead. Carrying a FireWire port, a big 40GB hard drive, and ATI Mobility 9000 graphics with 64MB of SDRAM, it is also powerfully equipped.
Though it should be up to just about any processing challenge, this 2-GHz Pentium 4-M model is not the best-performing Inspiron 8200 we've tested. Its PC WorldBench score of 95 is 5 points below the score that a 1.7-GHz version with the same amount of RAM got in our August Top 15 Notebooks review. The battery life could be better, too: Relying on its standard power pack, the Inspiron 8200 lasted a subpar 2.4 hours in our tests, about 10 minutes shorter than the last 8200 we tested. One of Dell's heaviest notebooks, the 8200 weighs a little over 8 pounds not including its AC adapter, and 9.3 pounds with it.
The Inspiron 8200 is smoothly designed, with a couple of exceptions-- the eraserhead's concave mouse buttons are uncomfortable, and you have to use software to toggle the notebook's four dual-purpose buttons between audio playback and shortcut duties. You can easily access the memory and hard drive. The notebook has both traditional and cutting-edge connections, including a cable for adapting the S-Video-out TV port for use as a composite-video port or S/PDIF audio connection. The strong built-in audio system, with speakers on the sides, includes handy volume buttons (but no mute). When the 8200's monochromatic case gets boring to look at, you can swap the palm rests out for a different set in purple, blue, gray, or yellow for $19 per set. The printed documentation, which includes a useful setup poster and an owner manual, is still incomplete, addressing only niche areas. However, it has a fresh new look and does cover some important topics, such as the difference between composite video and S-Video. For most information, you still have to rely on a user guide stored in the Windows Help and Support Center.
Though the Inspiron 8200 failed to make a strong showing on standard office apps, it is a stellar mobile moviemaking machine. Dress it in a pair of whimsical iridescent-jade palm rests if you will, but it has the graphics memory and configuration options to handle just about any digital editing or number-crunching duty you care to throw at it.