The
Dell Inspiron E1505/6400 Notebook is the midrange model in Dell's line of notebook PC's, balancing performance and price for home and business users. The E1505 provides solid all around performance, multimedia features, good battery life and a reasonably large, easy to view display, though at 7lbs with the 9 cell battery, it is about as heavy a notebook as you'd like carry around much.
The E1505 is an update to the top selling Inspiron 6000, and looks almost identical to its predecessor. The internal differences are more significant, as the E1505 is based on Intel's new Core Solo and the more interesting Core Duo processors, Intel's replacements for the Pentium M laptop cpu.
Dell offers lots variations of most of its computers, and that's especially true for the E1505. The E1505 is sold as the Inspiron 6400 on Dell's Small Business website with the XP home or XP Pro operating system, where the laptop's versatility is its main selling point (powerful enough to replace your desktop, but also suitable for frequent travelers). On the Dell Home website, the notebook is sold as the E1505 with the Windows Media Center operating system, and the E1505's Digital Entertainment features get more billing.
Most Dell shoppers are aware that pricing changes frequently, and coupons and/or free upgrades change daily. Taking these into account, you can usually purchase a very capable base model E1505 for under $800, though it's pretty easy to "option" up your selection to $2000 or more with upgraded processor, video, hard drive, memory, and other options. The model I purchased, for $1159, was configured as follows:
Intel T2400 1.83GHz Core Duo CPU,
15.4" widescreen display, 1280X800 resolution
1 GB DDR2 SDRAM
8x CD/DVD /-RW dual layer (24X CDRW/DVD-ROM)
100 GB 5400 rpm SATA hard drive
85 whr 9 cell Li-ion battery
Intel Pro 3945 wifi a/g adapter and Dell 350 Bluetooth adapter
256Mb ATI Radeon X1400 graphics chip (128Mb dedicated, 128Mb shared)
Windows Media Center Operating system (no TV tuner included, external tuners optional)
Microsoft Works Suite 2006,
"Instant On" (sort of) option for media playback (Dell Direct Media)
4-USB 2.0 ports
5-in-1 removable memory card reader - Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, Secure Digital(SD), Multi-Media Card (MMC) and xD Picture Card
Line-out (external speakers/headphone) and microphone jack
Video: VGA port, S-video port
Firewire port
Ethernet and modem ports
Express card slot
In the Box and
Setup "In the box" with the E1505 was a large quickstart guide, application cd's, and power adapter. Dell's power adapters are nicely designed, cables on the each end of the power block, one to the laptop and one to plug. When not in use, the power cables can be wrapped around the powerblock and strapped down with an elastic strap.
Setup was easy, plug it in and turn it, and follow through the short windows setup wizard and registration. A 90 subscription to McAfee Security Center is included, which will provide antivirus protection for 3 months. The wireless card recognized the wireless network in my home immediately. After supplying a wireless encryption key, I was able to access the internet and the other computers on my home network.
Appearances and Controls The E1505 is 1.5 inches thick, 14 inches wide, and 10.5 inches deep, and including the larger battery, it weighs in at about 7 lbs. The E1505 has silver housing trimmed with glossy white molding, identical to other Dell Inspirons. The display measures 15.4" diagonally. My son owns a Dell notebook with a 14.1" display, a
Dell XPS 140, a notebook which performs well, and is a lot easier to carry around (and almost identical to Dell's E1405 notebook). But I find the display too small for comfortable viewing, at least at its native resolution. The extra 1.3" on the E1505 makes a world of difference to me.
The controls are convenient and intuitive. The keyboard is a typical of Dell notebooks, workable, but tight. The trackpad is located below the spacebar, and is easy to use, though never quite as comfortable as a mouse. The touchpad handles both cursor movement and scrolling. Scrolling is handled by touch sensitive scroll bars on the side and bottom of the touchpad. Scrolling with the touchpad becomes second nature fairly easily, just hold your finger down on the right edge of the pad, and then slide up and down to scroll up and down a document or web pages. You can also "drag and drop" by tapping once on a item, to grab it, and then you can move it across the screen with your mouse pointer. Tap again to release the item.
Seven multimedia buttons with attractive "Dell blue" backlighting, are located on the front edge of the laptop for controlling cd and dvd playback. There are three dedicated buttons for raising, lowering and muting volume. Two other buttons are located just above the keyboard, one to power the notebook on and boot windows, and the other to power on the notebook, but bypassing windows to start Dells Media Direct software. If you want to use the E1505 to watch DVD's or listen to cd's, you can turn on the computer and launch Dell's Media Direct software in just under 20 seconds (bypassing most of the Windows startup routine).
On the right side of the laptop is a 5 in 1 card reader, two USB ports, a firewire port, express card slot, headphone and microphone jacks, . On the right is the dvd/cd drive. On the back, less conveniently located, are 2 more USB ports, modem and Ethernet ports, VGA and S-Video port and power connection. The removable battery and memory card slots can be accessed from the bottom. The BlueTooth card is also accessed from the battery compartment.
Using the Inspiron E15050 Playing Music and DVD's My laptop has a 15.4 widescreen (16:10 aspect ratio) XGA display with Dell's "TrueLife" coating. The native resolution is 1280 X 800. The speakers are good, but there's not much bass (Dell's 17" entertainment notebooks, which have a subwoofer, sound better). Sound quality is consistently good at all volumes. The TrueLife screen looks great, a Dell laptop with a TrueLife screen is as good a portable DVD player as you'll find. Windows Media Center is a solid media player, especially if you're connecting the laptop to a large television using the S-Video or VGA output port. CyberLink's PowerDVD is also included, which is even a better choice for playing DVD's on the laptop.
Alternatively, the Dell Media Direct button above the keyboard provides a way to startup your PC, and launching Dell Media Direct application in about 20 seconds, bypassing most of the windows startup routine. Media Direct can then be used for playing music and video's and viewing images. Media Direct appears to be a rebranded version of CyberLink's PowerCinema software package, functionally and visually similar to Windows Media Center. Unfortunately, when you use Media Direct, you can't play any files with DRM licensing (music files from purchased from Napster, for example).
Battery Life I opted for the 85whr 9 cell Li ion battery, and tested battery life by playing a DVD with volume set at 30%, used a set of headphones for listening, and set the screen brightness at 50%, all comfortable settings for watching a DVD in quiet environment. At these conditions, the battery lasted almost exactly 4 hours. Based on these results, I'd expect the standard 6 cell battery to last about 2.6 hours. For comparison, the battery life of the XPS 140 that my son owns is about 3.3 hours with a standard battery. The smaller XPS140's smaller display and low end graphics chip contribute to the improved battery life. Recharging the battery takes about 3 hours.
Performance I chose the most powerful graphics Accelerator for the E1505, a Radeon X1400 with 128Mb of dedicated ram, and another 128Mb shared memory, though I expect serious gamers won't be too impressed. Benchmark tests indicate 3D performance is only a little better than the Radeon 9700 powered
Dell Inspiron 9200 reviewed here a little over a year ago. Its good enough to play most games, though you might need to turn down a few details on the latest and greatest games.
I ran the Aquamark 3 gaming benchmark on this laptop, and compared those scores to the same benchmark date taken on an Inspiron 9200 laptop with very good 3d graphics, an ATI 9700 chip and 1.8 GHz Pentium M745 CPU. As can be seen, the scores are very comparable. The Radeon X1400, would have been close to state of the art for 3d notebook gaming 12-18 months ago, but today its "just" a good "middle of the road" choice for occasional 3d notebook gaming.
Aquamark3 E1505 Scores (Inspiron 9200 scores)
Overall: 28439 (26891)
GFX: 2390 (3138)
CPU: 8831 (8888)
Ave Frames Per Second: 28.44 (26.7)
These scores are much better than what you'd get with the standard Intel Media Accelerator onboard graphics, I ran these benchmarks on a Dell XPS M140 notebook with a 1.86Ghz Pentium M cpu with the base option Intel Media Accelerator graphics, and got an average FPS of only 6.4)
I also ran Sisoft Sandra's 2007 Multimedia instructions and Arithmetic benchmarks on this 1.86 GHz dual core laptop, and received the following scores. Scores in parentheses are for an Inspiron 9200 with similar clock speed but single core Pentium M CPU (1.8GHz)
Sisoft Arithmetic Benchmark scores Dell E1505 (Inspiron 9200):
Dhrystone: 12313 MIPS (5527)
Whetstone: 9130 MFLOPS (4364)
Sisoft Multimedia Instructions Benchmark scores:
Integer: 28500 it/s (16681 )
Floating Point: 38792 it/s (18832)
The Sisoft Sandra benchmark takes advantage of the dual core processors to show the potential benefit of two processors, but unfortunately lots of software (like most games), isn't yet designed to fully take advantage of dual core processors.
I've occasionally copied DVD's to my laptop drive to watch on trips, using a freeware program called DVD shrink. In the process, DVD re-encodes commercial DVD's to reduce file size by about 40%, and remove the copy protection. Interestingly both the XPS 140 laptop that my son owns, and the Inspiron E1505 have the same DVD drive, so I compared the time to required to copy a DVD (that I own, Firefly Serenity) to both laptops. This was done in an effort to compare the performance of a dual core and single core cpu in an application where the advantage of the dual core cpu would be utilized. About 35 minutes were required on the E1505, and almost 60 minutes were required by the XPS 140, quite an impressive improvement.
Display The Inspiron E1505 comes with a 1280 X 800 resolution 15.4-inch widescreen TFT display with TrueLife coating. There were no dead pixels on the laptop, and colors are displayed evenly across the screen.
Viewing angles are good, but not great. Dell says left and right viewing angles about 40 degrees, and I think they are a little better than that. Dell lists up and down viewing angles as 15 degrees from above and 30 degrees from below. I'd estimate more like 15 degrees from above or below. When viewing from above screen washes out, and from below everything darkens quickly.
Pixel response time is about 25ms, by my estimate, not Dell's. This is a rough estimate, using a bench mark program called "Pixel Persistence Analyzer" which allows you to vary the speed at which two colored blocks, separated by a variable, known distance, move across the screen and use that separation distance and speed to calculate a response time. Response time is comparable to other Dell laptops I've owned, but not as good as most of the desktop displays you can buy now. 25ms is good enough for causal/occasional 3D gaming, but its not quite good enough if gaming will be the E1505's main duty.
Storage Our laptop came with a 5400 rpm 100 GB hard drive , a 2.5" Toshiba MK1032GSX 5400 rpm SATA 150 drive with an 16mb cache and an average seek time of 12 seconds. This drive provides solid mainstream performance. Its not reputed to be one of the fastest 5400 rpm drives available, most users probably won't notice. If you think you might, consider upgrading to a 7200 rpm drive.
Sisoft Sandra's File System Benchmark for this drive was 33mb/sec, which is a reasonably good number for a 5400 rpm laptop drive.
The 24X CDRW/8X DVD plus/minus R/RW combo drive installed in our laptop was a NEC ND-6650 DVD dual layer DVD writer. It supports packet writing (drag and drop burning), but does not support Mt. Rainier packet writing and the fast formatting it allows. Performance of this drive matches its nameplate speeds, 24X cd writing and 8X dvd writing with media rated at least for those speeds. Its not incredibly fast, but burning a cd takes less than a couple of minutes longer than it would take to burn a cd on a 52X cd writer on your desktop.
Support The E1505 warranty included in the base price is for 1 year. Dell still provides better than average customer support, despite the company's huge size. Calling Dell to get help can sometimes mean jumping through a few hoops to get help you need, but I've found I eventually can get the help I need, which is more than I can say for a lot of companies. The user forums on the Dell site are very active, and are another excellent source of help and information.
Conclusion There's not much fault to find with Dell E1505 laptop, but there's also no breakthough improvements that make this model stand out from previous versions. Dell laptops continue to be a good value, assuming you take advantage of Dell's frequent coupons and discounts. The Intel dual core notebook CPU's hit the market ahead of AMD's version. Keep in mind that these not 64 bit processors, if you're wondering how these laptops might work with Vista. The dual core cpu will make some applications run faster, particularly multimedia editing (images, video, audio files). The E1505 handles office and home productivity applications quite well, and the notebook has all the connectivity you most users would expect (bluetooth, wifi, firewire, flashcard reader, vga and s-video ports). The E1505 handles 3D games moderately well, when compared to other mainstream laptops, but if gaming is your top priority, look for a notebook with a faster 3d graphics solution.
