Dell Inspiron 1300 - Any good?

[The_One]

Considering getting a laptop for browsing the net, downloading a few files now and again and sometimes altering photos etc in photoshop.

Was looking at a Dell Inspiron 1300 with the 15.4inch screen upgrade.

What do people think of these laptops and are they good value for money?

Intel® Celeron® M Processor 380 (1.60 GHz, 1MB L2 Cache, 400 MHz FSB)
256MB 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM (1x256)
60GB Hard Drive
15.4inch WXGA (1280x800) LCD Panel
8X DVD+/-RW with Software
Dell™ Wireless 1370 802.11b/g Mini PCI Card

£396

I was then going to purchase a stick of 1GB crucial laptop memory ti upgrade the memory as it is a lot cheaper then speccing it with the memory from dell

 

[SiriusB]

£400 quid is not too shabby for that spec. It is a shame it only has 256MB of RAM though... I'd have wanted at least 512MB in this day n age. But you're sticking your own in so I suppose its all academic.

SiriusB

 

[Viberious]

I recently purchased a Inspiron 6000, after seriously looking at the 1300, but I wanted the larger screen with centrino abilities (Longer battery).

The 1300 is okay but for me it didn't have the umph required.

Also if you fitting additional memory why not see if with the laptop price plus the additional memory price you could get something more powerful.

 

[GuruJockStrap]

Was tempted by the 1300 when I purchased a laptop a month ago but in the end went for an Inspiron 630m, mainly due to the Pentium M, battery life and the fact I'll be out and about with it.

It came with a 6 cell battery and under light tasks I can get around 4 hours from it.

The 1300 comes with a 4 cell battery by default that you'll get around 2 hours from it. The 6 cell would get you around 3 hours, so consider that if going mobile.

That spec should easily cope with the needs you specified.

My only complaint is the default Windows installation Dell provide comes with a huge amount of bloat.

On first boot mine had a staggering 59 running processes! Obviously, the laptop feels a bit sluggish with all that running in the background.

I've since wiped the HD, installed a fresh, un Dell'ed, version of windows and got the running processes down to 20.

 

[The_One]

Can you easily uninstall the unneeded running processes or do you "need" to do a reinstall with a seperate copy of windows XP?

I'm also addicted to football management sims such as Football Manager 2006. Would the inspiron with the extra ram i plan to get cope with that without "chugging" away slowly?

 

[iGiDK]

I've got a Inspiron 2200 with 512MB RAM which is similar in many ways to the 1300 series (I dont think Dell do the 2200 anymore as it was last years model)

To be honest it was rather sluggish however that all changed when I removed the pre-installed Norton 2005 which resulted in a dramatic improvement

Mine runs FM2006 really well mate although I only run leagues in one country

 

[The_One]

Nice one, cheers

 

[lemonkettaz]

edit: ignore this reply