Dell's Inspiron range of mobile PCs has been a highly successful, well-known brand name amongst corporate users. Many business and high-end corporate users have sworn by it for quite some time. But perhaps the most interesting factor with this new 400MHz version is its undoubted appeal to home users wishing to "replace" (we use the term rather loosely) a desktop PC and also to make use of its undeniable power for games. And we're talking Half-Life here, not Minesweeper.

For part-time telecommuters, traveling with the Inspiron 7000 is exactly what this laptop was built for. The machine is so fully loaded with all the trimmings (large hard drive, 8MB graphics card, 15.1 inch TFT, etc.) that packing it up and driving to the office, then slotting it into a docking station in seconds is what is in order. Of course by weighing in at nearly ten pounds, it's not the sort of luggage that users with smaller biceps would wish to haul around. And no, ladies, it doesn't fit snugly into a handbag either (might be substituted in as a good weapon though).

If you're looking for something more portable, try Dell's 3500 range or perhaps one of the newer super slim line Notebooks (around the 3-4 pound mark). On the other hand, with this Inspiron 7000, you'll be able to perform all of the 'usual' work related applications such as word processing, spread sheets, web browsing presentations (and the odd web site update from halfway round the globe) but even better still, when you pack it up and go back home you can always pull out a flick from your DVD collection and relax. Once the cat's away (i.e. the wife/hubby goes to sleep) the mice can indeed play some 3D games- it's actually powerful enough.

Dell offers a full range of the NEW (Dixon) Pentium II CPUs and Celeron CPUs but as stated, this unit was fitted with a new Pentium II 400MHz. An extremely solid AGP compliant (66Mhz AGP local-bus frequency) Intel 440BX motherboard (which should last for a while in the realm of the laptop market) is certainly bog-standard but it's also as good as it gets right now.

Intel introduced the mobile Pentium II back in April 1998 but the design has since changed. Older Pentium IIs were based upon its desktop equivalent with 512K of secondary cache memory that only ran at half the speed and sat side-by-side with the CPU. This new mobile CPU, which the Dell uses, harbors 256k of cache, which resides within the Pentium II's core itself. Thus the cache now runs at the full speed instead of half the speed. The new design also reduces the all too precious space needed for a CPU unit when designing a laptop.

There are no streaming SIMD extensions just yet and with the delay of Coppermine/Geyserville to the notebook sector, the Pentium II 400MHz will probably be the fastest CPU for at least a few months yet.