Price: ~$3100US as tested
Availability: Now

There's something sexy about notebooks. Whether it's the call of a gorgeous LCD or the feeling of freedom one gets when they can go anywhere and still be chained to their desk, notebooks make geeks go ga-ga, and with some luck you may get the boss to purchase one for you.

But one thing notebooks tend to lack is style. Other than Apple's iBook, most notebooks have rather ho-hum exteriors that fail to please the eye, even if the internals please in the benchmarks. Dell has decided to break their notebooks out of the ho-hum mold with their new Inspiron 4000. This tidy bundle packs an Intel Mobile Pentium III 750MHz with SpeedStep (running it at 600MHz when on battery), a 14" XGA LCD, DVD, 128MB of RAM, a 20GB HD, and dual-ported ATI Rage128 video with 8MB of memory.

Yes, other companies have models with similar features, but Dell manages to pack those features into an attractive (to us at least), relatively thin and lightweight shell with a swappable color top as well as changeable color wrist rests that let you accentuate and customize the look of your Inspiron 4000. We managed to get our grubby little hands on one of these notebooks and put it through a suite of benchmarks, lived with it, played with it, worked with it, typed on it, and, of course, watched "The Matrix" on it in order to see how it could perform the all-important in-flight movie test.

Is the Inspiron 4000 worthy of carrying the Dell name or does it sacrifice substance for style? Read on to find out about all the details, including performance, battery life, and those little touches that mark the difference between a good and bad notebook.