Dell Inspiron 8200

After 5 years of usage, my Dell Inspiron 6400 no longer starts up easily. you have to keep pressing the start button almost 20 times before you are lucky to get a boot, and half way through the boot-up, the whole process freezes and you have to pull the plug to start again. I'm now learning that the hard drive recognition might be failing and is a typical problem with this machine after the same years of usage.

I owned my Inspiron 8200 for 4 years. It cost me $2100 in 2003. I had the opportunity to upgrade the RAM to 1GB. My laptop is still running very well. The fan might need a replacement, I'll just wait until it breaks.

In general, this laptop is a very excellent machine, and if I didn't use powerful programs for engineering modelling and simulation, I wouldn't think of buying another one.

I purchased my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop a year ago and have used it daily since then. Though there are lighter weight and more powerful laptops around, this has been a workhorse that has delivered.

I initially wanted to dual boot Windows 2000 and Mandrake Linux 8.x, but found that the Radeon 9000 video card in the system had no drivers for either (there is a Radeon 9000 driver in both, but these drivers are not compatible with this laptop). I was forced to use the Windows XP that came with the system and buy a third party video driver for Linux. SuSE 9.0 solved the problem with full 3D graphics support for this version of Radeon (as far as I know, Windows 2000 is still not supported).

Dell once had very good technical support, but they have slipped quite a bit in the past few years and, if anything goes wrong with a Dell, be prepared for a painful time getting it repaired.

The delivery of my Inspiron 8200 from dell was a nightmare, the tech support is a continuing nightmare with no one knowing what is wrong with the computer. i have a next business day contract and it doesn't matter. when they don't turn up they apologise, but only if you call them.