Dell Inspiron 3500 C300XT

Dell Inspiron 3500 C300XT

SUMMARY

PRO: Modular bay accepts various devices, Dell's support and notebook reliability rank among the best, AGP graphics bus for peppy presentations CON: Awkwardly placed AC adapter jack

Looking for a high-quality business notebook at a moderate price? At $2229, Dell's Inspiron 3500 C300XT could be the answer, especially if you've been waiting for Pentium II-300 prices to drop to earth.

The C300XT--the first portable we've tested that runs on Intel's new Celeron-300 chip--gives you PII-300 speed and expansion options that only a month or two ago would have cost hundreds of dollars more. Factor in its 4GB hard drive, 13.3-inch active-matrix screen, 1.5-inch-thick case, and 7.3-pound traveling weight (including AC adapter and CD-ROM drive), and you'll understand why this multimedia portable sidles past Gateway's Celeron-266­based Solo 2500SE and into the top spot on our budget chart.

Because Celeron chips contain only 128KB of onboard cache--half as much as Intel's other new CPUs--the C300XT lags behind some new higher-end notebooks we tested. It trails Hewlett-Packard's OmniBook 900, a Pentium II-300PE­based notebook, by about 5 percent. But this Inspiron's PC WorldBench 98 score of 160 beats the average PII-300's score by a point or two, and its price falls hundreds of dollars below the median for PII-300s.

Compared to its bigger sibling--the 10.4-pound, $3549 Inspiron 7000 A366LT--the C300XT makes a better choice for the average business traveler or budget buyer. It's much thinner, lighter, and cheaper than its behemoth kin. And although the larger Inspiron has a longer battery life, the C300XT endured for a tolerable 2 hours and 45 minutes in our tests.

The notebook's modular bay can accept any of several extra-cost add-ins, including a second battery, a DVD-ROM drive, or a Zip drive. The bundled floppy drive and 10X­24X CD-ROM drive share the same bay. Only the location of the AC adapter connection, which Dell decided to group with all the audio jacks on the right side instead of situating in back, struck us as an unwise design choice.

The C300XT boasts a comfortable keyboard that's a scant fraction of an inch wider than average, and the included Synaptics utility lets you program the buttons to launch applications. Dell provides beautiful manuals, and the company's generous support includes around-the-clock toll-free phone lines and three-year warranties on parts and labor.