Price: ~US$3500 as tested

Availability: Now

There are always tradeoffs in design. Pick two of three: fast, durable, inexpensive. You just can't have it all in one design. The tradeoffs for notebooks usually involve weight, features, battery life, speed, and price. Dell knows this and offers a wide variety of notebook computers to meet various consumer needs. Different products have different trade-offs, and Dell's build-to-order online purchasing system allows you to customize your dream machine even further.

Dell's newest mid-sized model, the Inspiron 5000e, trades light weight in favor of more features. This is not a full-size laptop. It is a mid-size, three-spindle laptop with near-full size features, and it has style, something generally lacking in the laptop world.

The 5000e we tested had the following major features:

• Pentium III 800MHz
• 440BX chipset motherboard
• 128MB PC100 SDRAM
• 15" 1400x1050 LCD
• ATI Rage Mobility 128 w/16MB SGRAM
• 30GB 4200rpm hard drive
• 8x/24x DVD/CDROM drive
• Integrated floppy drive
• ~7.5lbs with battery and DVD drive

As you can see from the basic specifications, the Inspiron 5000e is a full-featured laptop, so read on to get the full-featured review.