And what a strange "division" it is... As we stated earlier on in this review, this "truly mobile" segment of the notebook market is very different from the traditional mobile market. Whilst trying to keep the MHz as high as possible and the price as low as possible, manufactures have to face many challenges. Power consumption, battery life, heat dissipation, limited in-chassis real estate, noise reduction and of course when dealing with liteweights, the ultimate goal is to remain under the specified weight of 3-4 pounds. But what good is a 3-4 pound laptop to anyone if it only lasts an hour and harbors hardware from yesterday and thus does not possess enough of a knock out punch for sparring with Microsoft Word, Excel, Power Point, Outlook and any other killer app you may or may not need for work?
- Weighs only 3.4 pounds (with a 23WHr battery)
- Slim 1-inch silhouette in a sleek yet durable magnesium alloy case
- Large viewing area on a 12.1" XGA TFT display
- Integrated 10/100 NIC and integrated 56K3 V.90 modem
- New low-voltage Intel Pentium III processor at 700MHz with SpeedStep technology
- ATI RAGE Mobility M video with 4MB of memory
- 5GB to 20GB internal hard drive and add on an external second 20GB hard drive.
- Up to 256MB of RAM
- An external media bay widens the Inspiron 2100's capabilities and keeps it receptive for the latest in peripheral technologies, such as 24X Max CD-ROM, 8X Max DVD-ROM, 4X / 4X / 20X CDRW, Zip 100, or a second 20GB hard drive
- USB port
For a full list of specs check here.
The 2100 ships with a low-power mobile Intel Pentium III 700MHz low-volt CPU with "Speedstep". 700MHz is plenty fast enough for all MS Office-like applications. It'll be just fine and dandy for your emailing and scheduling needs too. Yes there are faster processors available in the mobile market, but not for the "ultra-lite" notebook market. A faster Pentium III notebook will mean choosing to carry the extra 4 pounds that go with a middleweight. In fact, we think the new 700MHz mark is quite a leap considering that the ultra-lite market was full of notebooks running Celerons and Pentium IIs not so long ago. The "low volt" Pentium III has opened the floodgates for more MHz - a good thing in anyone's notebook.
As you can expect with a 100MHz FSB Intel Pentium III, there is 256KB of on-die internal cache to keep it happy.