The
Inspiron 9200 is an aircraft carrier laptop that costs quite a bit less than, as far as I can see, every other product with equal specifications. It's 394 by 288 by 41.5mm in size when closed (15.5 by 11.3 by 1.6 inches), and it weighs about 3.6 kilograms (eight pounds) with its standard six-cell battery - a bit more with the higher capacity nine-cell unit.
In a couple of important departments, the 9200 outclasses machines that cost a lot more.
First important department: The screen. In the States, this laptop can be had with WXGA+ (1440 by 900) or WUXGA (1920 by 1200) screens; the higher res screen was the only option here in Australia when I ordered, and it is of course all that any true nerd would remotely consider.
It's only got a 60Hz refresh rate (it's an LCD and so has zero flicker, but no software can paint more than 60 full frames per second to the screen) and its response rate is unspecified, so snobbish gamers might not be totally crazy about it - but I didn't see much ghosting in games, and the sheer pixel count is extraordinary. As is usual for laptops these days, the screen on my 9200 seems to be immaculate, too; no stuck-on or stuck-off subpixels that I can see.
There's an anti-glare coating on the screen that gives light colours a slight twinkly appearance.
Some people appear to believe that this ruins the whole laptop. Some other people simply seem to be frightened by all those pixels.
All of these people are bad, and wrong, and their mothers do not love them.
2,304,000 pixels on a 17 inch diagonal screen does, of course, make for a darned dense display. Since the viewable area's about 366 by 228mm, this screen has about five and a quarter pixels per millimetre - 133 dots per inch, getting on for twice the 72dpi that computer screens are still often assumed to have. There are smaller laptop screeens out there that also have 1920 by 1200 resolution, too; they're up around 150dpi.
One day we'll have screens with 300dpi-plus density and software that knows about them and never forces us to squint at five-pixel-high text, but we're not quite there yet. Since you sit close to a laptop, though, you don't need the eyesight of a predatory bird to actually see stuff on a screen as dense as the 9200's without having to awkwardly size up everything you can and keep a magnifying glass handy for things that still can't be fixed. You sit further away from desktop monitors, and that is, presumably, why super-dense laptop panels haven't shown up in any desktop screens, dearly though many keen-eyed nerds would love them to.
Second important department: The CPU. The 9200 is a "
Centrino" laptop, which means it uses Intel's
Pentium M processor. History will remember the Pentium 4 as an unfortunate dead end in processor development; Intel are still using Prescott cores in their early dual-core processors, but to get their heat output down out of the stratosphere they're going to switch to Pentium-M-type cores as soon as they can. So the P-M's offspring will be seen in tons of desktop machines in the near future.
The big deal about the Pentium M is that it draws much less power than the Pentium 4, but is rather faster, clock-for-clock. It's clocked a fair bit lower, though, so even the top-spec 2.1GHz P-M isn't up there with the best of the desktop processors for most benchmarks. But the M comes
close enough for most people, and only has a Thermal Design Power of 21 watts - which, in a laptop, means longer battery life and unscalded thighs, even if the processor never uses its "SpeedStep" clock-slowing feature because not much is going on.
The rest of the Inspiron 9200 is unremarkable, by modern laptop standards. It's got a Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics adapter (thoroughly game-capable, though you'd better not expect a whole lot of anti-aliasing on that monstrous screen), built in wireless networking, a 10/100BaseT Ethernet adapter, built-in modem, and I sprang for a single 512Mb memory module (leaving one RAM slot free for more), the DVD burner (8X speed but only single layer on this Australian 9200; that's no big deal, since blank dual layer DVDs are still foolishly expensive and seem likely to never really take off), an "80Gb" hard drive (more on those quote marks in a moment...), and a couple of years of anti-theft insurance in whose claimability I have a quaint, childlike faith.
I stuck with the basic 1.6GHz CPU, because that's still easily fast enough for anything my sister's going to do in the approximately three years before this machine's listable in eBay's "Vintage" category.
