Dell Inspiron 1420 User Review Discussion

The Dell Inspiron 1420 is a new-to-market 14” Intel Santa Rosa platform-based laptop. It is the successor to the previous Dell Inspiron e1405 laptop, and is the smallest in a new line-up of laptops from Dell. It is available with a wide array of processor options, from the Core 2 Duo T5350 to the Core 2 Duo T7500, removable drive options up to and including a Blu-Ray drive, wireless-N internet, integrated or discrete graphics chipsets, and more.

Read the full content of this Article: Dell Inspiron 1420 User Review

 

excellent, in-depth review!

 

nice review.
i'll be recommending it to my cheapo friends.
one correction

actually graininess comes from compression, not from resolution.

 

Thanks for the interesting and comprehensive review.

 

Rockin review, makes me want to get one, although I won't

 

now this is how reviews should be. Nice job

 

now wait, does that bios pic of computrace mean the software installs into the bios? because i was hoping it would do that but was told it is simply software

the reason i care is because, if it gets installed in the bios, the harddrive can be completely taken out or formated and still have the protection

 

Really nice, was waiting for this one, nice done.

V-Sync is evil, if u don't want framerates droping so drasticaly turn it off anywhere u can. I don't want to go into details, but with V-Sync on, u cut your framerates in half whenever they drop bellow your Monitor refresh rate.

 

Great review! Very comprehensive.

 

Ship time of 6 days? *rubs out eyes* WHAT?!

 

I thought the unboxing photos were a bit long-winded, but you won me over anyway.

Nice review.

 

One of the best reviews I've seen! Very nice and timely as well with all the anticipation and questions about this rig. Too bad about the GPU but battery life and other improvements seem to be on track

 

Wow, this is one awesome review!!! You went into a lot of detail, which is what I like!

 

it gets installed into the bios indeed. i just reformatted my 1420 and lojack was still activatec (you cannot deactivate it).

nice in-depth review!

 

well thats fantastic! is that only for dell or no?

meaning was that already in your bios when you first got the computer, or only added it after you installed the software?

 

Very good review indeed!

 

you have to install lojack first. it does not come with it.

 

Very nice review.

Just incase anyone is wondering, I'm using the 160gb 7200rpm, and the left palmrest does get a bit warm :\. It's okay but it still a little bothersome (the 7200rpm i got was a seagate)

You also got .1 higher on your Vista Experience rating than me! Not cool =P haha

 

Thanks for an excellent review with some useful info on gaming performance.

John

 

QTF benchmarks should only be ran with it of.

Good job on the review otherwise, I'm sure it was a lot of work.

 

Nice Review. Can u make VideoStressTest in CSS/HL2?
Thanks

 

Thanks for a very thorough review. Can you say something about the noise of the laptop a various levels of activity? Does the bulge on the keyboard seem to impact the screen when the laptop is closed?

 

Very interesting review. I am starting to believe that I should've gone with a 14 inch laptop to get the battery life that I want to last to my day to day school work. My 15.4" only gets about 4.5 hours despite the "up to 6.7 hours" that is listed on the specifications page for my model.

One interesting thing I noticed is that the 1420 does not have the "external LEDs" that are apparent on the 1520 (the 3 LEDs that stick out on the right side to represent power, battery, and HDD activity). A small thing, and I always think Dell needed to label those LEDs also...

Great review!

 

Not bad at all...I love the options in terms of specs especially coupled with the pricing, and are you sure you have your dates right with the shipping? thats fast!...but anyhow, why do they still have to be so ugly? That still turns me off...but most persons probably not as concerned about looks as I am.

 

Just wanted to chime in and agree that this was an excellent review - some of the detail you went into is great (down to the individual weights of the laptop itself, the battery, the power brick). Even the measurements for the size of the trackpad!

 

stellar review.

 

Great review..... and my best regards to all the 1420 owners out there.

 

How a review should be done, thank you!

 

Great review. Judging from the Dell subforum, you seem to have gotten your laptop alot faster than most people.

 

Great review!. Not so smart to advertize that you steal movies on a public forum.

 

Wow great review, really good info, and nice laptop.

 

? I don't get it, lol.

 

Hey everyone, thanks for the great comments. I'll be happy to answer all your questions. Being at work I didn't even know this was posted yet until just a few minutes ago.

 

I don't steal movies. The shots of Pirates of the Caribbean Curse of the Black Pearl were taken from my privately owned DVD. The shots of The Bourne Ultimatum and Hairspray were taken from the publicly available HD 720p trailers available at http://quicktime.apple.com (you can actually see the website in the background of the photos / screenshot). And I have to say that their 1080p trailers are completely fantastic played on my 2405fpw desktop display

 

The Computrace LoJack for Laptops is a combination of hardware and software. There is a physical component in the laptop, which is what the BIOS relates to, and then a program that runs from within Windows. My understanding is that the chip will work without the presence of the software and vice versa (this is from both the Forbes review I talked about in my piece and the recent review of the LoJack software on this site that I read after I submitted my review).

What I found most interesting about the BIOS option is that once the hardware is turned on, it is on forever. And if you instead choose to disable it, it's gone forever (but the software will still work).

If anyone is curious, I still have not installed the software. I probably will before I take the computer on my first trip however.

 

Does anyone else think the 1420 looks like the 1210....?

 

Absolute knock-out of a review. Great job thanx. Strange that Cnet is not out with their vid yet. This model seems to have created a lot of interest around the net. Looks like a winner.

 

Really great review!

That's a sweet looking lappy. Dell has improved astronomically.

 

I like how Dell's shaping up since they posted those bad numbers couple of months back.

Nice review, and the 1420 looks like a great option for someone looking to fork out 1k for good to great specs.

 

the lojack software, is it free? ppl have said this also works independently without software, so how does that work?

 

The LoJack For Laptops isn't free - it is included with CompleteCare (the accidental damage / theft plan for $119).

Yes, it can work independently of the software. If you look at the 2nd to last picture in the review it's a photo of the BIOS screen that relates to a LoJack chip installed in the laptop, which would carry out the same function as the software. The two when present work with each other but the software can function without the chip and vice versa.

 

does your 1420 have any sound problem? I hear a lot of noise when I use the headphone.. dell is going to send me a replacement. I just need some reassurance that not all of them have the same problem.

 

I have used the laptop with my Shure E2c headphones and do not hear any noise at all. My hearing isn't the greatest though so that's no guarantee.

I had someone ask me about playing 1080p content so I'm downloading the Rush Hour 3 Trailer 2C in 1080p from the Quicktime Movie Trailer site right now. I'll post up impressions shortly.

 

Well, 1080p content is unfortunately less than perfect. While the Rush Hour 3 trailer played essentially just fine except for two spots, the Get Smart trailer was awful. Definitely below normal framerate.

As for Windows Media HD content...I downloaded the 1080p trailer of the IMAX move "The Magic of Flight"...Played absolutely beautifully. I guess Quicktime is still much harder to decode than WMV. Wonder if Apple'll ever figure that out. Probably not...

 

"Quicktime" isn't a format to decode...... it's just a container format (which was used as a model for MPEG4 actually). There shouldn't be anything about it that should be that hard to decode though; the most common codec Apple at least uses for their own HD-encoded content is h.264, which I don't think most hardware should have trouble decoding. Either way, it's a standard codec, so it's not like it is something that requires Apple specifically to "figure out".

-Zadillo

 

Would you care then to explain the performance difference I and many others encounter then? Especially now that Windows and Mac OS PCs run on the same hardware?

 

Not sure, do you mean performance differences with the Quicktime Player app itself, or with h.264-encoded HD content video?

If the former, I would suspect it's because Quicktime Player for Windows just isn't going to perform as well natively - as an application, it's a ported Mac app which depends on a variety of Mac libraries, etc. that were also ported over.

If you mean the latter, I can't explain why you would have an issue with h.264 content. Again, this isn't necessarily anything Apple specific...... personally I don't use Quicktime Player itself on Windows, I just use other apps and have them play the same content.

Again, this is all fairly standard stuff:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/

This is essentially what Apple is using now with Quicktime 7, and what all their HD encoded content is done in now.

-Zadillo

 

Dell is beating its "estimated ship time" by several days. I ordered my 1420 on July 7. Dell gave me an estimated ship date of July 30. However, I received the unit on July 16.

The 1420 has a better fit and finish than my previous Dell laptops (Latitude models). The keyboard is very sturdy and quiet. I've only been using for a few days, but so far this is a very impressive laptop.

 

This is precisely what I was hoping you'd say and is my idea also. I've not tried using any other player so I can't comment on that, but your thoughts echo my (and others') experiences.

 

QuickTime Alternative is what I use on my PC, and it seems to work well (quicktime .mov files open up and play just fine in ZoomPlayer, etc.):

I hadn't been keeping up with it though, and it looks like the original QuickTime Alternative is no longer available (apparently it used a commercial codec from Apple or something to work, so the original devs took it down).

I might have misunderstood how it worked; I had thought it was basically just something that let you play .mov files without having to use QuickTime Player specifically, but it sounds like it was more than that.

If you Google around though, you should be able to find it, or a new alternative called QT Lite that apparently functions the same way.

-Zadillo