Dell Inspiron 9400

Dell's latest attempt to have its piece of the Microsoft's Media Center Edition (MCE) pie lies with the Inspiron 9400.

This dual-core laptop comes with an Intel T2500 (2GHz) processor and a total of 1GB dual-channel DDR2 Ram operating at a speedy 677MHz.

Its Sysmark 2004SE score of 214 is quick and consistent to what we've seen with other dual-core notebooks, such as the Asus V6X00J.

A PCmark05 result of 3,262 was also similar to the Asus but a fair way off the quickest notebook score of 5,293 clocked up by the gargantuan Rock Xtreme 64 earlier this year. Nevertheless, the Dell is well-equipped to run most software at impressive speeds.

Where the Inspiron 9400 loses marks is with its graphics. For the £1,500+ price tag we expected more than the bog-standard integrated 945GM chipset from Intel.

Although, this is part of the Express family and dynamically shares 224MB of memory, it still only managed a wimpy 621 in 3Dmark05 and 8fps (frames per second) in our Far Cry tests.

Full performance results can be found on our Reportlabs database.

However, Dell will tell you that this notebook is less about gaming and more about multimedia. The 17in WXGA+ is certainly big enough to watch DVD movies and any video files stored within MCE, while the 100GB hard disk is large enough to hold a fair amount of content.

Although the display runs at a maximum resolution of 1,440 x 900, we found the screen itself to have a very poor viewing angle and colours to be quite flat.

In short, we've seen much better laptop screens at this price; a DVI port offers some solace.

Battery life was more impressive - three hours, 49 minutes for a 3.6kg notebook is a real plus point and further testament to Intel's new mobile platform.

All the usual ports are dotted around the case and a quick-access media panel is woven into the front lip. We're used to seeing dual-layer DVD writers on notebooks these days, so it was a shock to find Dell had only included a single-layer model.

But, with dual-layer media so expensive, whether or not you'd actually use a dual-layer drive to its potential is debateable.

The Inspiron 9400 also comes with a three-year on-site warranty and Microsoft Works 7.

Although it's an impressively mobile for a 17in laptop, we've seen far more versatile examples for this price.