By Michelle Thatcher
25/07/2006
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/notebooks/0,39050488,39176124p,00.htm

The middle child in Dell's line of basic home laptops, the Inspiron 6400 makes a good home or small-business system if it stays put most of the time, as it's too heavy for regular travel. With the Inspiron 6400, all of the crucial elements are accounted for: You get a comfortable keyboard and touchpad, a decent display, and a very solid collection of basic multimedia features and connections. The base unit starts at approximately S$1,799, but Dell offers a vast array of configuration options for everyone from the most basic Web and email user to digital junkies who require midrange gaming and graphics capabilities. That said, if you're looking for a similar set of features but a larger display, check out the Inspiron 9400; if you're looking for something more portable, the Inspiron 640m weighs less and offers a similar experience, just with a nominally smaller display. HP also makes two systems, the Pavilion dv5100 and the Compaq Presario V5100, which offer comparable feature sets and weigh a little less.

Design
Measuring about 355.6mm wide, 265.4mm deep, and 36.6mm thick, and weighing 2.8kg (or 3.72kg, with its considerable AC power brick), the Inspiron 6400 is too large and heavy for regular travel. Skirting the line between midsize and desktop replacement, it joins the legion of other low-priced 15.4-inch widescreen laptops on the market.

The Inspiron 6400's 15.4-inch widescreen display can be configured with one of two native resolutions, XGA or the finer SXGA+, and either a glossy TrueLife or standard, nonglossy finish. We prefer the finer resolution, which affords more screen real estate, but if you have bad eyesight, the lower resolution will make text and graphics appear larger, though less detailed. The glossy finish makes the display look brighter but also gives off a distracting glare in sunny or well-lit environments. Our glossy, SXGA+ test unit delivered a solid score of 160cd/mē on our Minolta luminance meter, which tests a display's maximum brightness. The Inspiron 6400's keyboard is adequate, and the touch pad and two mouse buttons are nice and big, though they don't afford a great amount of tactile feedback.

	Not exactly the sexiest of notebooks, the Inspiron 6400 nevertheless inspires with its value, if not its design.

Features
The Inspiron 6400 offers a standard array of ports and connections that should fulfill the needs of most basic users. The offering is virtually identical to what you'll find on the Pavilion dv4000, except that the Inspiron 6400 lacks a Type II PC Card slot (inconsequential, unless you already have a bunch of PC Cards) and has a media card reader that supports one additional format (SmartMedia). One of the very best things about the Inspiron 6400 is the set of seven handy multimedia buttons that sit smack in the middle of its front edge, which makes it easy to control music and movies, even when the lid is shut; no other vendor offers controls as simple and as good. Also onboard is Dell's MediaDirect software, which can play CDs and DVDs and access other digital media on the hard drive whether or not Windows is booted. The two speakers placed along the front edge deliver sound that's crisp and clear but lacking in bass.

Performance And Battery Life
Our S$2,831.85 Inspiron 6400 came preloaded with Windows XP Media Center Edition and a premium set of components, including a 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo T2500 processor, 2GB of DDR2 RAM (2 DIMM), a midrange ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 GPU with 256MB of video RAM, a big 120GB 5,400rpm hard drive, a dual-layer DVD burner, and a three-year warranty. Interestingly, in CNET Labs' tests, our Inspiron 6400 delivered performance that wasn't that much faster than a number of somewhat less well-configured laptops, including the Lenovo 3000 N100 and Dell's own Latitude D520; we're skeptical that the Inspiron 6400's premium configuration is worth the investment.

That said, the Inspiron 6400's base configuration, which should do the trick for basic home users who just want to surf the Web and send email, starts at about S$1,799 and includes a decent lineup: a 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo T2300 processor; integrated Intel graphics; Windows XP Home Edition; 512MB of RAM; a 60GB 5,400rpm hard drive; a multiformat DVD burner; 802.11a/g wireless; and a six-cell battery. We'd advise more ambitious users to shell out the S$425.25 or so for the higher-resolution display, a 100GB drive, and 1GB of RAM.

With a big, nine-cell battery (an S$144.90 upgrade), our Inspiron 6400 fared well in our drain tests, lasting just short of 5 hours; still, battery life shouldn't be a huge consideration for a laptop that's not particularly portable.