My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1501 that I've had for four months now. The laptop is very steady and well made.
The CPU is an AMD X64 dual-core that can come with several frequencies and packs quite a punch for a laptop CPU and runs very cool even under heavy loads. The laptop comes with one fan that will run very quiet and you can barely hear the fan unless the room is quiet.
The battery will last roughly four hours under power savings mode, under normal power usage the battery will last about two hours. The battery life can also be increased by buying a second battery that can go in the expansion bay on the side of the laptop.
The screen is very nice, its a high definition screen with an integrated video chipset that can produce a high definition output for the screen. All Dell Inspiron 1501's come with an ATI Xpress 1150 video chipset.
The audio chipset installed is decent when you are sitting in front of the laptop, but if you are away from the laptop the sound it is terrible sounding.
The keyboard is very large, quiet and perfectly made for typing. The mouse touch is not to sensitive nor to sensitive and come with a slider bar on the side for moving up and down webpages. I like this feature a lot.
The wireless chipset is very sufficient for casual use. For example webpage browsing, online video gaming and viewing videos. The chipset is not for sending large amounts of data over the wireless link.
The laptop comes with four USB ports, a VGA connector, audio connectors, 4 in 1 card reader, ten/hundred ethernet port, and 56k modem. The ports on the laptop are sufficient, but a DVI and/or s-video connector would have been nice.
The operating systems that comes with this laptop is XP and Vista. This laptop runs both very nice. The only OS that this laptop is not suited for is Vista X64 this is due to lack of driver support. The laptop is 64-bit and will run XP X64. The only driver I couldn't find this the 64-bit version for the ethernet port. Dell has an excellent webpage for finding drivers and diagnostic programs.
Out of the few laptops I have had and the many computer I've had I like this laptop very much. The laptop has many great qualities and I would recommend this as a buy for the mainstream laptop user.
