1998 Dell Inspiron 7000 Retrospective Review

[Atomic Wanderer Chicken]

Lets take a trip back in time to 1998. The Dell Inspiron 7000 was quite a good laptop back in its day. The Inspiron 7000 has a basic black design and the case is made of a very durable hard plastic. There is one USB port on the back, a PCI slot for wireless card, vga port, ps2 port, serial port and a printer port. In the front of the laptop there's a CD-ROM and a floppy drive. The screen on the Inspiron 7000 is quite sharp for 1998, and has a decent resolution of 1024x768 and can go up 1280x1024. The laptop features a Pentium II processor, up to 192mb of ram, ATI Rage Pro LT graphics, and a 4gb hard drive. The keyboard is nice to type on, and is nicely laid out. The performance of the Inspiron 7000 was very good for the time. It could play games like Half-Life and Need For Speed III Hot Pursuit fairly well. Programs worked decently also, and browsing the web back then was probably very good too. The processor fan does kick in playing games or doing extensive work (its a 1998 laptop of course). The laptop is very thick and weighs a whopping 8 pounds which made it not great for carrying for long. The Inspiron 7000 was upgradable to Windows XP which made the experience much better than using Windows 98.

 

The Good

Robust power for its day

Capable of playing current games back then

Nice Keyboard

Very durable design

CD Rom Drive

1 USB port

Infrared for beaming PDA devices etc.

 

The Bad

Quite heavy and thick, some laptops in 1998 were much lighter and thinner also.

The speakers are not that great

The design isn't that attractive

 

 

Bottom Line

The Dell Inspiron 7000 was a good and capable laptop in 1998. It's robust power made up for its uninspiring design. At 8Lbs, the Insprion 7000 wasn't an ideal laptop to carry around. If you had this laptop in 1998, you had a good laptop back then.

 

Specifications

 

Dell Inspiron 7000
 ? Pentium II processor
 ? 32MB or 64MB of memory, up to 192MB
 ? Liquid crystal display, 13.3", 14.1", or 15"
 ? CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives
 ? ATI Rage LT Pro graphics chipset
 ? integrated 56k modem
 ? lithium ion battery
 ? 8.2 to 8.9 lbs.
 ? 4BG hard drive, expandable to 8GB
 ? $2,799 to $2,999

 

[Praetor]

wtf what's the point of a review if it's more than 15 years old??

[Elliot B.]

wtf what's the point of a review if it's more than 15 years old??

For a flashback! :)

[Blaze_Zewi]

wtf what's the point of a review if it's more than 15 years old??

15+ years from now I will look back at my current i7 Haswell and say the same thing too. :D

 

nostalgia....... :shifty:

[Atomic Wanderer Chicken]

Back then this laptop would have been considered good. I made this review as if it were 1998, it is a retrospective review

[Dot Matrix]

Why on all these "reviews"?  :/

[Lord Method Man]

How well does it run NESticle??

[sanctified Veteran]

wtf what's the point of a review if it's more than 15 years old??

 

Revisionism is great if it helps you to rescue cues and strategies of value that have been forgotten. Lenovo operates on this principle, for example.

[Tomoko]

I've been on the fence about whether to go for the Inspiron 7000 or the Gateway Solo 9100. I've found this review very helpful.

 

The Powerbook 3400c looks pretty nice too but most of my programs require Windows 98.