The Inspiron 1720 is from Dell’s new range that offers a choice of eight lid colours. We’re fans of the chassis design, too – it isn’t groundbreaking, but looks fresh.

Build quality is excellent, and the keyboard benefits from a numeric keypad on the right. Our only gripe is that the touchpad is located too far to the left, which means your palm could brush it when typing, throwing the cursor to a different part of the document.

Other than this, the design is decent – there’s a 2-megapixel webcam in the screen bezel, dual microphones to cancel echoes (making voice recognition more accurate) and a super-bright 17in LCD. The full HD resolution makes everything a little too small for our liking, but many will appreciate the extra space for keeping more windows open at once. Of course, there are lower-resolution options if you use Dell’s online configurator, but this laptop is specially priced for this review, so custom-building your own specification may cost you extra.

There’s no Blu-ray or HD DVD drive, but the GeForce 8600M GT made Call of Duty 2 just about playable at 1024 x 768. Thanks to a Core 2 Duo T7500, 2GB of RAM and twin 160GB hard disks running in a striped RAID, performance was top-notch here. It also gives the Inspiron oodles of storage space, and there’s the standard dual-layer DVD writer for archiving files.

Wireless connections include draft-n Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth, but, as with the Toshiba, it’s a shame to see only a stereo mini-jack output for audio. The speakers can’t match the Toshiba’s, but are still better than most.

The 1720 cleans up in terms of battery life, however, with its nine-cell battery lasting 5hrs 22mins in light use. Heavy use reduced this to 1hr 35mins, but it’s still longer than others here, and means you can use the Dell around the house without its power supply.

Overall, the 1720 is good enough for most people, but competiton is fierce: you can drop the spec to reduce the price but this makes it collide with Asus’ bargain. But we’d rather pay more and get a far-superior, more-configurable XPS M1730 monster which, despite battery-related limitations, offers the best combination of performance, features and desirability this month.