The Inspiron 5000e we tested came with an 800MHz Pentium III processor. An 800MHz processor provides more than enough power for most of today's uses, including business tasks and games. 128MB of SODIMM SDRAM gave the pre-installed Windows 2000 OS plenty of RAM in which to run free. An IBM 30GB HD provides more room than most people will ever need, and while it was poky compared to desktop drives, it did perform to our satisfaction. A quick check on the Dell web site showed us that they do not offer the 30GB drive as an option right now, but they do offer a 32GB option.

An 8x/24x DVDROM drive provided reasonably quick software installs and enabled us to play DVD movies (more on that later). The drive mounts in a hot-swappable bay on the center front of the machine. The battery installs on the right front and the integrated floppy is stuck on the back left side. A second battery can be installed in the DVD's bay. All the removable parts have latches on the bottom of the machine. This is a frustrating design since, unless you practice, you have to turn the machine on its side or upside down in order to catch the latch and pull out a module or battery. There is a PC card slot on the right back of the machine, and Dell sells optional PC Card Ethernet and modems for it. You can also get an optional 56K modem in an internal expansion slot. Our test machine came with this internal modem.

For video, the Inspiron 5000e uses an ATI Rage Mobile 128, a.k.a. M3, matched with 16MB of video memory. The standard amount is 8MB, but we strongly recommend the $49 16MB option if you are at all interested in 3D performance. 2D performance is excellent, and the dual-head feature allows you to use an external monitor along with the LCD. There is also an SVHS output on the back of the machine for TV presentations.

In our subjective testing, the 16MB of SGRAM allowed reasonable performance at up to 800x600. Our Inspiron 4000 model, which only had 8MB of SGRAM, did not do nearly so well since, even at low resolutions, it often had to resort to AGP memory texturing.