A superb small laptop that offers plenty of features, power and value for money

Designed to sit between the low-end Inspiron and high-end XPS families, it comes in 15in and 17in flavours and its target audience could be pretty much anyone: few laptops are as customisable as this.

Form and function meet in the middle in one supremely well-made package

Dell's 6400 is a great value mid-range notebook with very few weaknesses. The support is the icing on the cake.

The Inspiron 630m is Dell’s first 14-inch widescreen notebook.

The Dell Inspiron 6000 walks into this roundup with a serious disadvantage – packing only an Intel P-M 1.86GHz and an ATI Mobility RADEON X300 it is easily outgunned by the competition.

The 9300 is reminiscent of its predecessor, the Inspiron 9100, which was pitched squarely at power users and gamers looking for plenty of grunt. This product refresh takes it one step further by using a mobile processor rather than the desktop CPU found in the 9100.

Dell's reputation at providing reasonably priced capable 'books shines through in the 510M - the cheapest notebook on test this month.

Slightly less sturdy than previous Dell models we have seen, the D500 is finished in attractive silver bezel housing, the keyboard is comfortable to use and offers all the functionality of standard-sized desktop keyboards.

Managing a very respectable battery life of four and a half hours during a full productivity workload, Dell's Inspiron scored around middle of the pack under PCMark04 but failed to deliver in 3D, bringing up the rear in third last place.

Despite not being the smallest or lightest notebook, this veritable speed demon packs a 3.06GHz desktop Pentium 4 processor and is matched with an ATI Mobility 9000 graphics adaptor and quarter gig of PC2100 DDR RAM. Another notebook to dispose of legacy parallel, PS/2 and serial ports, it boasts a pair of rear mounted USB ports, S-Video output and FireWire connectivity. Also included are 10/100 Ethernet, a 56K modem and single PCMCIA slot for card expansion.

On receiving this unit, we were impressed by the mammoth 15.4in widescreen display. Although sceptical of its ability to perform given its monster display size, we were proven wrong at every turn, with the 8600 performing similarly to the more expensive Toshiba Tecra S1 Notebook (July 2003 page 40). Absolutely bursting at the gills with features, this Notebook boasts an array of connectivity options including side mounted FireWire and IrDA, while on the rear of the unit we find two USB and legacy serial, parallel and S-Video ports.

Powered by a 1.6GHz mobile Pentium processor, featuring dual-band 802.11a/g wireless capability and sporting a 15.4in wide-screen display, the Dell D800 represents the best of the Latitude series of notebooks. At around 3.3kg, it is not light, nor is it thin – but is complemented by an exceptional finish and a solid set of technology.

Dell's new Inspiron 5100 delivers a truckload of performance thanks to a 2.8GHz P4 processor, which even managed to outscore the 3GHz Hi-Grade we tested this month.

Dell is never one to be outdone when it comes to cutting edge tech

This 8200 is almost identical to the model we reviewed in (September 2002, page 39), but it now packs ATI's new RADEON Mobility 9000, the first full-featured DirectX 8.1 compliant mobile video chip to market.

For as long as the Labs has been running, Dell has been a regular participant, and has also been a consistent performer.

Fastest Notebook