BIOS: Technology Means Business

The Inspiron 6000 is Dell's newest midrange widescreen laptop. Featuring the latest Intel 915GM mobile chipset and providing good performance and battery life at an attractive price, the Inspiron 6000 may be ideal for small businesses and consumers looking for a high resolution screen and plenty of multimedia features. The laptop's external media control buttons and decent speakers help to distinguish the system, but its slightly dim display may not be up to demanding graphics tasks, games, or heavy-duty video editing. Whilst the Inspiron 6000 is not an exciting product, it's a solid performer that offers most of the features typical users demand.

Pros: Good value; choice of screens; excellent battery life
Cons: Dim display; noisy optical drive

Dell's latest midrange laptop offers plenty of multimedia features for the average home or small-business user, but its performance and connectivity options are mediocre. Set to replace the Inspiron 5160, the Inspiron 6000 comes in a relatively attractive white-and-silver chassis and allows you to further tailor the look of the laptop through four new interchangeable clip-on covers (£23.50 ex. VAT) - although we're not sure why you'd want to.

The Inspiron 6000 (356x266x39mm, 3kg) is relatively well specified under the hood, too. Based on Intel's second-generation Centrino technology (code-named Sonoma), you can choose either an Intel Pentium M or Celeron M processor, 256MB to 2GB of 533MHz DDR2 memory (two user-accessible SoDIMM sockets), 30- to 80GB hard disk drive, as well as the type of optical drive (DVD-ROM, CD-RW/DVD combo or 8X Double Layer DVD+/-RW).

The 15.4in. screen even comes with a choice of models: WXGA (1280x800 pixels), WXGA+ (1680x1050 pixels) and WUXGA (1920x1200 pixels). For this review, Dell shipped BIOS a machine based on a Intel Pentium M 740 (1.73GHz) processor, 512MB of system memory, 60GB hard disk, Double Layer DVD+/-RW drive and a WXGA+ screen (costs from £1507 (ex. VAT).

The Inspiron 6000 is also available with a choice of graphics chipsets. You can either opt for the cheaper and much less capable Intel Media Accelerator 900 GPU which uses up to 128MB of shared memory, or ATI's DirectX 9.0-compatible Mobility Radeon X300 with either 64MB or 128MB of dedicated video memory. The latter of which was used in our test system, along with 128MB of video memory. You should definitely consider the latter if you intend to run games or high-end graphics applications.

Dell hasn't neglected connectivity options either. As expected, there's a V.92 modem, 10/100Base-TX Ethernet (Gigabit Ethernet not supported), and front-mounted silver media controls that let you alter volume levels and navigate audio tracks - even when the laptop's lid is closed.

Even connecting digital multimedia devices is made possible thanks to the inclusion of Wi-Fi (802.11b, 802.11b/g or 802.11a/b/g) and Bluetooth, an S-Video (TV-Out) port, a single unpowered 4-pin FireWire port, four USB 2.0 interfaces (two on the right edge and two at the rear), an integrated Secure Digital (SD) card slot, and headphone and microphone jacks. Unfortunately, there's no digital audio or video outputs (analogue VGA-out only), and no dedicated buttons to toggle Wi-Fi or Blueooth on and off.

In terms of performance, the Inspiron 6000 is relatively speedy. It's not the fastest laptop, but it isn't really designed for intensive data processing or gaming - even though it comes with a PCI Express chipset. Possibly the best feature on the system is its relatively long battery life. In our tests, we managed to power the system for 3.5 hours using the standard 6-cell 'Smart' Lithium-Ion battery, which is actually really good for a desktop replacement system. By comparison, some of the more powerful laptops run for just 1 to 1.5 hours between charges.

The only criticism here is that Dell's power-saving feature drastically dims the display while the system is running on battery, so much so that you may find working with the standard settings uncomfortable. If you need even more power autonomy, such as for long flights, Dell offers a 9-cell battery (£57.58 ex. VAT) which should give you a couple more hours usage. Whatever options you go for, the Inspiron 6000 should satisfy.

About our tests:
BIOS uses Futuremark's MobileMark 2002 benchmarking application to test the overall performance and battery life of laptops running Windows XP and Windows 2000. The primary purpose of this benchmark is to measure how long a mobile computer can run on a single battery charge. What makes MobileMark2002 unique is that it measures system performance while the battery is discharging using a number of popular applications (Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Netscape Communicator 6.0, WinZip Computing WinZip 8.0, McAfee VirusScan 5.13, Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1 and Macromedia Flash 5.0). PCMark04 Pro is Futuremark's application-based benchmark for measuring component-level performance. It uses portions of real applications instead of including very large applications or using specifically created code. Futuremark's 3DMark05 Pro runs game tests to provide an accurate overview of a system's gaming performance. In all benchmarks, the higher the score, the faster the computer.