Dell's Inspiron 9300 series of notebook computers features extremely large widescreen displays, excellent processing power, and dedicated graphics chips for gaming or graphic design. Plus, they start around $1200, making them reasonably priced machines for all the computing muscle you get.

That starting price comes with a 1.73GHz Pentium M processor and 512MB of 533MHz DDR2 memory. You can increase the memory to at least 1GB (at a cost of $100), and you have the option of stepping up the processor to 2.0GHz (at $320--incremental increases are more reasonable).

Dell includes an ATI Mobility Radeon X300 with 64MB of dedicated video memory at the baseline price. It's a good chip that will aid in video rendering. But, in a rare case for laptops, you can choose to upgrade the graphics as well. For $99, you can opt for the 128MB version of the X300 or for $199, you get NVIDIA's 256MB GeForce Go 6800 for stellar laptop graphics performance.

You'll see that performance on the huge 17-inch widescreen-aspect display, capable of 1440x900 resolution. You can upgrade the display to Dell's TrueLife for sharper 1920x1200 resolution at a cost of $125. Of course, that large screen adds to the heft of the 9300, pushing its weight up to nearly eight pounds.

The default hard drive provides a decent 60GB of storage space at 4200rpm. You can step up to a faster 7200rpm drive for $99, or 80GB for $49, giving you more room for multimedia files and installations. The 100GB drive costs an additional $79.

The optical drive is a combination 24X CD-RW / DVD-ROM, capable of playing DVD movies and burning audio and data CDs. If you want to burn DVDs on your laptop (including high-capacity Double Layer media), you can upgrade to an 8X DVD+/-RW drive for a reasonable $99.

There's a nice range of connectivity ports on the 9300 including a Firewire port, six USB 2.0 ports, and a built-in SD card reader.

Dell's Inspiron 9300s aren't the lightest of laptops, but they are some of the best desktop replacement systems around.

Pro: Great power and price, awesome screen and graphics
Con: Heavy, some upgrades required



[Note: In 2006, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a voluntary recall of about 2.7 million lithium-ion battery packs used in Dell laptop computers. To learn more, follow this link]

Warranty
1-year limited