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Dell Inspiron 710m

73

Good

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Pros
Sleek design; nice widescreen
Cons
Short battery life

Performance: Poor: 57
Features: Very Good: 80
Design: Good: 77

Find out how these scores, and their relative weights, combine to produce the PC World Rating.

Performance
ACD Systems ACDSee	690
Adobe Photoshop	345
Adobe Premiere	604
Ahead Nero	1320
Battery Life (Office Applications)	2:32
Discreet 3ds Max DirectX	489
Discreet 3ds Max OpenGL	604
Doom 3, 1024 by 768, 32-Bit	4.03
Far Cry, 1024 by 768, 32-Bit	9.73
Microsoft Office XP	533
Mozilla	404
Musicmatch Jukebox	536
Number of Included Batteries	1
Return to Castle Wolfenstein, 1024 by 768, 16-Bit	32
Return to Castle Wolfenstein, 1024 by 768, 32-Bit	27
Roxio VideoWave	420
Unreal Tournament, 1024 by 768, 16-Bit	46
Unreal Tournament, 1024 by 768, 32-Bit	18
Windows Media Encoder	439
WinZip	490
World Bench 5 Score	82
World Bench 5 Word Score	Very Good

WorldBench Tests
Multitasking	721

What You Should Know about the Inspiron 710m

Not Much RAM for Multitasking

The more RAM your laptop has, the faster programs will run and the greater number of windows you can work in at one time. If your needs are simple and you rarely do more than two things at once on your PC, the relatively modest amount of memory that comes installed in inexpensive laptops will be enough. Today the standard amount of RAM shipped in most PCs is 2GB. If you like to multitask--say, you want to launch a search for a file and start backing up data to a disc while you watch a news video--you need more memory.

Reviewed by: docvenzon

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Compact and lightweight. Great for web browsing, web processing, and slide presentations.

Weaknesses: Gets hot pretty quickly. Noisy optical drive.

Overall Evaluation: I was looking for a replacement for my 2-year old Dell 700m. The 710m just happened to be on sale at the same time so I snapped one up. It is basically in the same chassis as the 700m, although the color is now entirely silver/gray, whereas the 700m had white trimmings.The size and weight of this laptop (and the older version 700m) are its main advantages. No more shoulder and back pain while carrying this baby around. I mainly use it for word processing, powerpoint presentations, web browsing, and occasional DVD watching. And for these tasks, it is more than adequate. Just don't expect to play 3d extensive games.I do have a few gripes about the 710m. I noticed that it gets a lot hotter on my lap when compared to the 700m. Whether this is due to the faster processor that the 710m has, I cannot be sure. Also, the optical drive can get pretty noisy when reading CDs/DVDs, and it ocassionaly gets annoying. But other than these, it's a solid compact laptop.
Reviewed by: anis

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Very bright screen. Light (although it seems heavy due to the ration of weight to size, but it's still lighter than a normal laptop). Keyboard has a good steady feel.

Weaknesses: No restore CD, and as a result there is a partition on the Hard Drive (about 3.4Gb) that is unusable and exclusive for Restoring the System to its original state. The keyboard is a bit crunched.

Overall Evaluation: Overall this is a good laptop. Good speed, nice screen, smooth touchpad and keyboard. Only 2 USB ports. The headphones/mic ports are very near the touchpad, which can sometimes make it difficult to operate. I expected this to warm up less, being a Centrino, but after an hour work, it was pretty warm (but very silent!). Aesthetically it is a bit thick: as thick as a bigger laptop, but all in all very convenient to carry around. The Power Adapter is the same size as a bigger laptop, making it not so portable. As this is an ultra-portable notebook, it would have been useful to have a smaller adapter.