It’s silver chassis with white trim looks good, if not great, and is very solidly built.

Ergonomically it’s good. The full size keyboard is very-well weighted and comfortable to type on and the mouse is accurate and responsive with good buttons which don’t make loud clicks. The screen displays a crisp and well-lit desktop which is comfortable to work on. For multimedia applications it’s good too – our HDTV video looked good with impressively little lag. Colours weren’t the brightest but watching movies proved enjoyable. Horizontal viewing angles are good enough to watch with a friend though the vertical viewing angles were mediocre – colours will wash out if there’s a height difference between you. All this was enhanced by some impressive speakers (for a notebook) which got loud without distorting and only really lacked bass.

The multimedia buttons on the front, which Dell calls ‘MediaDirect’, should improve the multimedia experience further, but unlike the Inspiron 9400, they’re version one. Thus, they boot in to Windows before launching relevant applications.

The 630m is powerful too. The CPU might not be dual core but it’s a very powerful at 2.26GHz Pentium M. 1GB of RAM is included and there’s a second slot for more. It managed a benchmark score of 0.94 – just six percent slower than our speedy desktop system. It will happily cope with all 2D tasks thrown its way.

With so much focus on multimedia applications and performance a decent-sized 80GB hard disk is sensible – though it can be upgraded to 100GB if you’ve more pictures, movies and music than this can handle.

However, it’s no 3D performer. The integrated Intel graphics with 8MB of shared memory simply won’t run any modern games.

Connectivity options are adequate: there are four USB 2 ports, a mini FireWire, VGA and S-Video out and a modem port. There’s only 10/100 Ethernet though and no DVI out but an Express Card slot is included along with a memory card reader which supports SD/MMC, Memory Sticks and xD cards. There are also two audio jacks for headphone and microphone. The optical drive is a decent dual-layer offering which supports 4x DVD+R9 writing though not DVD-RAM.

It’s not dissimilar to the A-Listed Acer Aspire 5672WLMi which offers more features, like dual-core, BlueTooth, webcam and VoIP phone and low-end 3D performance but for only $330 more. However, where the Inspiron wins is protability. At ^^^^KG it’s noticeably lighter and the one inch size difference makes it noticeable smaller. Battery life is also superior – our model came with a nine-cell long-life battery which lasted five and three-quarter hours under light-use and one and three-quarter under intensive – not significantly different to the Acer under intensive but over four hours more under light use.

The warranty is a very good two-years onsite with the first year being next business day. But we’d still recommend the Acer which offers better performance, features and value. However, if you want something more portable the 630m is certainly a fine choice for a multimedia notebook.