Like we said earlier, this one is no slow mo as far as performance is concerned. In fact, in some benchmarks, it raced past the Acer Ferrari 3000, which is also reviewed in this section-it’s

The Inspiron 600M sports (a) a LAN connector tucked away neatly in one corner and (b) a PCMClA card reader port performance was especially breathtaking in the CPU intensive benchmarks such as SiSoft Sandra 2004. Take a look at the scoresheet on page 38, and pay close attention to the audio and the video encoding benchmarks, where it trashed the Ferrari Laptop by a massive margin.

The Inspiron took 17 seconds to encode our test audio a file­a good 8 seconds less than the Acer Ferrari laptop. In the video encoding benchmark too, it got the job done 9 seconds quicker.

All this means that if you spend most of your time working with image editing or video encoding applications, you wont be pulling at your hair while working with the Inspiron 600M. The same can be said for gaming-thanks to the Mobility Radeon graphics processor, gaming becomes quite pleasurable.

We ran some benchmarks just to see how good the gameplay was: in the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo benchmark, the game was playable even at a resolution of 1280×960x32, showing a frame rate of 30.79 fps.

In Quake “‘ Arena too, the laptop scored 97.8 fps in the Max mode. Though this is no match for having a Mobility Radeon 9700 onboard, it gets the job done.

The Dell inspiron 600M sure looks impressive. Featuring a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4M processor and 512 MB of DDR memory, it’s not a slow mo either. So should you be buying one?

If you are looki ng for a la ptop that doesn’t weigh much, looks good, and offers awesome performance, this is it. Though at Rs 90,000 it might not be everyone’s buy, its features and performance sure enough, make up for the price-well almost.

Features

The onboard Pentium 4M processor running at 1.7 GHz means serious business. With its huge 1 MB of L2 cache, it packs enough punch to chew through most benchmarks. Along with this, the laptop features 512 MB of DDR memory running at 266 MHz, which makes life much easier for the user. All this power means better performance in bandwidth hungry video and audio encoding or editing applications.

On the graphics front, the Dell Inspiron 600M features an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 Graphics chipset, which makes desktop level gaming easily possible on the laptop.

There is more: if you wantto burn DVD movies of your wedding videos, go ahead and do just that with the DVD writer (DVD-RW) drive. Furthermore, the laptop is provided with two USB ports at the back, so you can connect USB devices such as a printer, a scanner or a digital camera.

Monitor from Access Online is a discreet, remote surveillance tool, useful for employers wanting to keep tabs on their employees and parents who want to keep an eye on their children. The product monitors and logs detailed reports containing lists of sites visited, and active applications, complete chat reports, a folder activity report, printer activity and detailed key log report.

Allowing you to capture and save screen images while you are away from your computer, it details exactly what was viewed at specific intervals, and runs hidden in the background. All reports are viewable only to the administrator with the password.

The installation process is fairly simple, but abruptly takes you to the main configuration screen. Here you are left to fend for yourself without any user manuals or even Read-me files. The program begins automatically on start-up and proves to be slightly CPU-intensive.

Next step is the configuration screen extremely basic, with five configuration tabs.

The first tab lets you configure the information to be logged and the report mailing schedule, which can be set to a pre-scheduled time-sadly this option refused to work for us! The next tabs are for connections, e-mail settings and e-monitor set-up, wherein you can set the password and hot-key. Curiously, these reports provide no encryption facility and the key-logger gave several erroneous logs.

For: Helps you remotely monitor the daily activities on your Pc.

Against: The product lacks finesse, possesses inadequate help files and the key-logger needs some serious tweaking.