As we said in the introduction, the Inspiron 4000 we tested comes with a 750MHz Pentium III processor. Considering the business/home office tilt of the Inspiron 4000, the processor provided more than enough power for normal use. 128MB of SODIMM SDRAM gave the pre-installed Windows 2000 OS plenty of RAM in which to run free. A 20GB HD provides more room then most people will ever need, and while it was poky compared to desktop drives, it did perform to our satisfaction.

An 8x DVD drive provided reasonably quick software installs and enabled us to play DVD movies (more on that later). The drive mounts in a hot-swappable bay on the right front of the machine, where the floppy installs and a second battery can go as well. The primary battery slot is on the left front of the machine. There is a mini-PCI slot on the right side of the notebook, in which our machine had a 56k modem. A 56k modem/Ethernet mini-PCI card is also available, and we recommend getting it.

For video, the Inspiron 4000 uses an ATI Rage128 Mobile, a.k.a. M3, matched with 8MB of video memory. 2D performance is excellent, and the dual-head feature allows you to use an external monitor along with the LCD. There is also an SVHS output for TV presentations.

In our testing, the 8MB of memory proved to be a bit limiting on performance. Modern games like Quake III Arena and MDK2 come with enough texture memory requirements to, it appears, force the card to use AGP texturing. This severely impacts performance. Cutting texture size, however, helps performance tremendously.

The 14" XGA (1024x768) LCD that comes with the Inspiron 4000 is just beautiful. It easily blows away the screen on the last Gateway Solo and Winbook Si notebooks we used. It works well with a wide viewing angle, is easy on the eyes, and gives excellent color. It is an LCD we would gladly replace almost any 17" CRT with. It also provides true 24-bit color, or at least something so close we could not tell the difference. Buyer beware: even if the specifications say a notebook supports 24-bit, you do not know that for a fact until you see it with your own eyes. Like we said, this Dell notebook does support 24-bit, and quite well too.

And that support is very important in DVD playback. Without accessing the full 24-bit palette, DVD playback can look downright atrocious. On lesser LCDs, Neo has looked like he needed a bit of Vitamin A and some Oil of Olay, and Morpheus looked quite a bit like a blemished teenager. But not so with the Dell Inspiron 4000. Frankly, this notebook makes DVDs look gorgeous. The hardware IDCT acceleration of the ATI video also helps in DVD playback by offloading some serious math from the CPU.