Dell Inspiron B-120 notebook: Whats not

to like?
I acquired a Dell Inspiron B120 notebook recently. It is made by Dell (duh!), who
probably pioneered the concept of PC by mail followed by exceptional service. This may
or may not be the case, but that is not what this review is about. Essentially the B120 is a
starter machine, at the very bottom of the Dell totem pole. The configuration that I got
(and was informed as the only one available on this model at that time; this was slightly
different from what the website said, but call me easy!) had the Celeron M360 (1.4Ghz)
processor with 400 Mhz FSB, 256 MB RAM, 40 Gb harddrive, 14.1 wide screen, a CDR/RW/DVD ROM, 4 cell Li ion battery, powersupply, bundled Windows XP home (SP2)
and other software. A Targus CTM300 case (since the one made by Dell was out of stock)
and a MS-office for students were also purchased. I paid Cdn$599 (for the computer only
plus taxes), the shipping was free. Since it was supposed to be a budget purchase, I went
with Dell since I had heard good things about their quality and service. I used to own a
Compaq notebook (386SL) nearly 13 years ago, a 386 Mhz, smaller notebook (~10
monochrome screen), 4 MB memory, 60 MB harddrive with windows 3.1 operating
system which had set me back by nearly 1200 bucks and the Canadian dollar was
stronger back then! The Dell sounded like a really good deal and it is amazing how much
power comes for a fraction of the price, just in a decade!
Talking of spoilt brats it turned out that the Dell notebook would not do for the
originally intended owner because it did not have a wireless card built-in and it was too
much of a hassle to carry a USB adaptor with its trailing tail, so the student ended up
getting another machine while I got to keep the Dell (rather than losing 15% in the
restocking fee and the hassle of shipping. Anyhoo, Christmas came early and I needed a
new computer for sometime anyway!).
Being a bit anal, I decided to make a clean start when I took over the notebook
and got to test out the PC restore software in the process! It turned out to be really easy.
Boot the machine, hit CTRL-F11 and the machine is restored to factory-fresh state in a
few minutes with the operating system and bundled software. This was way faster than
reinstalling windows from XP CDs and all the service packs and software that were
included, some of which were freebie junk, but others werent. The cost of this
convenience is of course that the restore utility claims a little over 3 GB of the 40 GB
and one has to be careful to not get rid of the 2 hidden partitions (easy to do if you are
poking around and do not know what you are doing [been there, done that, another
computer, another time!]). I have had the opportunity to repeat the restore a couple of
times after that and am happy to report that it worked perfectly each time. The reasons for
the restores were software-related and had nothing to do with the system supplied by Dell
or any defects therein. What else have I done with my chance acquisition well I did try
out both Linksys and D-Link USB adaptors and both worked well but the software with
the D-Link turned out to be a bit quirky. Wireless access, once established worked well.
The modem and network cable also work fine, as do the 3 USB 2.0 ports and the CD

writer. Some of the supplied software, such as McAffy (with messages that remind me of
the irritating MS office paperclip pop-up) got a bit on my nerves and I chose to replace
it with another time-tested antivirus software. I also removed the jukebox and AOL and a
few other unwanted goodies that Dell so kindly provided.
As more software got added to the computer, I noticed a noticeable slowing down
particularly during booting and screen refreshes and in the pagefile activity (disk activity
during boot and slow screen-refreshes as the virtual memory got used actively). The
proverbial handwriting was on the wall! It was time to add more memory, obviously,
particularly given that the video took up 64 MB of the 256 MB (shared RAM). Having
heard about the pros and cons and hypes around dual channel memory and its latency
etc., I first tried to add a 1 GB module made by Kingston. Unfortunately, the Kingston
SODIMM would work only by itself but not with the DELL supplied Nynya 256 MB
module (probably some density conflicts). So I next tried an Infineon 256 MB module
purchased from Dell to pair with the original 256 MB. This worked very nicely even
though it was more expensive than buying from other sources. With 512 MB on-board,
the computer works quite fast and the harddrive gets a lot of rest, as does the battery since
harddrives are power hogs!
Overall, my needs are very simple: email, web-surfing, wordprocessing, spreadsheets,
access-based databases, a bit of web design, some digital photo-retouching (Nikon
software), an occasional movie and some music and web-access, as well as speech
recognition for dictation (Dragon) and an astronomy type calculating program. What I
have works very well now and unless something breaks I hope to be happy with my
system for some time to come. Oh, and I added a USB Fantom Titanium external
harddrive for backup. It is a 80GB drive and works like a charm right out of the box. I
returned the Maxtor One Touch II external because there were problems with its touted
restore operations and software reinstallations (hence the 3rd PC restore on my B120
that story, some other time sigh!).
I suppose if your needs are modest, like mine, and games and video performance are not
a big issue, then the Inspiron B120 will serve you well for quite some time. Construction
is moderately sturdy with a reasonably bright screen, good power management options,
though it would have been useful to have the option to drop the CPU speed when on
battery just as ACER notebooks allow. My screen does not have dead pixels and though a
bit of twisting of the notebook lid is possible after all it is made out of plastic, the image
held steady. I did poke at the screen a bit and found it to be firm. My ancient Compaq, on
the other hand, had a squishy screen and even with slight pressure showed a dimple!
But FOLKS, how often do you think am I really going to try and view the image as I type
with both hands while at the same time trying to twist the screen physically? After all this
is a notebook and I am not going to bang it around, accidents aside. If I had that kind of
need, I would be looking at the Panasonic Toughbook and similar beasts costing about
five times as much as the B120 and higher! Getting back to reality, the speakers are quite
tinny, with audible distortion and do not play very loud. On the other hand, when I
plugged in my Bang & Olufsen earphones, they proved to be a bit too loud even at the
lowest volume setting, but the sound quality was extremelygood, much better than what I

got from the built-in speakers, so the sound card is not going to disappoint you entirely. I
tried my plantronics earphone/microphone combination that I use with my Dragon speech
recognition software and they were quite decent, audibly. If you want to watch DVD
movies and music, perhaps relying on the earphone/headphone would be more fruitful
than the built-in speakers, particularly since the included software allows an audio
experience that goes a bit beyond plain stereo imaging that is better experienced through
earphones/headphones. Speaking of bundled software, I could not find the promised
photoshop, but my Nikon software works fine and one can always add the full photoshop
anytime, if one so desires. The computer will handle photo editing quite well once you
upgrade the memory from 256 MB up.
Overall, let us not lose sight of the fact that the Dell Inspiron B120 is an
inexpensive notebook, and an extremely good value, and not just for students but their
parents as well! For many of us, who are not all that much into computer games, we
often do not realize how much we are oversold in the electronic warehouses and E-mags
and E-reviews on the power and capacities of our computers that we really need and
actually utilize.
The keyboard well it is actually quite nice. It does take a bit of getting used to,
as is true for any notebook. The glidepad (which replaces a mouse) is a joy to use, in my
experience, and it is interesting how I reach for it at work, where I have a conventional
keyboard and mouse! One must not shy away from utilizing the additional features and
functions of the glidepad, such as tapping at the corners to carry out customizable
functions, such as accessing the menu, scrolling or maximizing/minimizing the
application window, and the scroll feature is simply too addictive. One caution though:
be prepared to customize and fiddle with the adjustments (pressure, speed etc) of the
selections and scrolling it is great that customization is possible and allowed!
The CD-ROM (CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-read) is quite speedy, and somewhat
sensitive to CD imperfections (it chattered audibly when playing slightly off-centered
CDs which ran relatively quieter on other units, though there were no functional
problems; music played well, and programs loaded flawlessly). The CD tray (all
notebooks, not just this one) was a bit filmsy though it is holding out fine and unless you
are all thumbs and have 600 pound fingers, you are not likely to bend and break it when
placing CDs or smudging the oh so exposed laser diode. The supplied Sonic CD writing
software works well, but shows the backup function as a teaser that you get only if you
upgrade to the rather pricey full edition.
The notebook comes with a wordperfect 12 office suite, with the trial versions of
the spreadsheet and presentation software, with option to upgrade after 60 days, or you
may simply choose to keep the wordperfect wordprocessor. You have to live with the
nag screen though. I generally use the wordperfect/corel office 10 with service upgrades
and found the wordperfect 12 quite friendly with older files as well as ms-office
components. It is more so the case with the corel presentation files which are now more
tolerant of MS Powerpoint files.

The battery is a 4-cell unit and lasts a bit under 2 hours. A heavier 6-cell unit is
available for those who need more mobile power. I havent had the notebook long enough
to gauge the true battery longevity which is claimed to last about 300 charge cycles
(about an year if you use your notebook daily on battery power). Lithium ion batteries
might charge faster, may not suffer from memory problems but we still need something
with a longer lifespan. Work is in progress, from what I hear!
With any modern computer, heat is always a problem. I am happy to report that
this notebook only runs warm and not hot (I have used it for several hours at a stretch,
days after days) and I did not observe any use-related errors or sluggishness or worse. If
you are concerned about heat, though, USB powered cooling platforms are available,
though given that the notebook is not really slim, you might find the raise a bit
troublesome. I tried a thin cardboard wrapped in several layers or aluminum foil and it
was quite effective in dissipating the little heat that the notebook produces. It is really a
minor point. Incidentally, I have found the best posture to use a notebook to keep it on a
table with the notebook set farther away at the back so that the elbows can rest on the
table and the wrists on the notebook. This is somewhat different from what is
recommended when using a conventional desktop keyboard. To each his own, as they say.
At one point I got a bit concerned by the fact that the computer was not shutting
down unless I hit the shutdown or restart options twice. This turned out to not be
computer specific but due to some application hogging the resources and not shutting
down in the first go. The first shutdown or restart terminates the application and the
second one actually turns the computer off. In my case it was the Dragon speech
recognition software. Once I deselected its quick-launch mode, the problem was history.
The standby and hibernation functions, worked flawlessly even when the quick launch
mode of Dragon software was selected. I generally prefer to use the hibernation mode to
shutdown the computer since it is faster and I havent experienced any problems or flaws
even when I had programs running at the time of invoking the hibernation. Indeed that is
the bonus of using this mode because the programs are already launched when you reboot
the system from hibernation. It saves time.
I ran the super pi benchmark which tests the CPU (math processing) and memory
as well as disk function, since some amount of writing to disk is associated in this test
and this is what I got:

Pi
value
upto
##
digits
16K
512K
4M
32M

HITACHI
FLORA3010(Pentium
90MHz, Memory
40MB, Available disk
storage 340MB)
H:MM:SS
0:00:12
0:15:18
3:02:35
not done

Dell B120, 1.4Ghz

Celeron M360 340
MB free memory
15 GHz disk
H:MM:SS
0:00:03
0:00:25
0:04:51
0:51:19

As you can see, we have come a long ways from the 90 MHz Pentium! However,
when the test was run on a 1.7 MHz Pentium 4 desktop and a slightly faster ACER
(370M Celeron, 1.5 GHz) the times were nearly identical with the B120. It is no poor
cousin when comes time to perform.

Another test that I ran was the HD utility and the graphs for the results follow:

Comment: Note a bit of decline in performance over time. Access times were a tad slower
than the 9-10 msec access generally claimed for harddrives. Transfer rates overall were
quite decent.

Comments: Just for comparison, I am including above the performance of an external

USB 2.0 Fantom Titanium drive, which happens to be my backup drive.

Comment: Note the two non-standard partitions which hold the backups for the system
files should you need to restore. This may seem like a waste of 3 GB space to some, on
an already smallish harddisk, until you stand in my shoes and have had to restore the
system a few times (read the review!). The loss of hard drive real estate is peanuts
compared to the time saved during restore operations.

Comment: So far so good, I suppose!

CONCLUSION: I cannot deny, that it has been like a marriage of convenience of sorts! I
did not set out looking for a notebook or acquiring one. Finding one would have been
nice, as I did need to move to the next step in terms of mobility and slightly better
performance (from the 800 Mhz desktop I was using!) before this Dell essentially landed
in my lap! Perhaps the meeting was destined? It definitely was not easy in the beginning
and there were some adjustments that had to take place, including an almost trialseparation (remember those restores!) But, seriously once communication was
established (network and internet) and the piddly early adjustments (software re-installed)
were behind us, and we found a home with enough room to work without cramming each
others space (after memory was added), it looks like it is going to be a happy, loving
relationship until one of us dies (worst case) but even after that, I am sure, the
memories shall linger both modules to boot (pun unintended)!

1.
Overview of what model the notebook is, who makes it, what kind of notebook it is
(desktop replacement, ultraportable, budget laptop, thin and light etc.) and what the exact
configuration you got is (the processor, RAM, hard drive size, screen size, wireless,
operating system etc.)
2. Reasons for Buying: Why you bought this laptop, and what other laptops you looked
at before deciding to buy this.
3. Where and How Purchased: Where did you buy it from and for how much, do you
think this was a good deal?
4 Build & Design: What is the design like, does it look good, does it feel sturdy, what is
the case made of, what color is it, is it too heavy, is it easy to carry or use in your lap?
Try pushing in on the lid to see if you get ripples on the LCD screen, this is a good
indicator as to how much protection your screen has. Also, try "wobbling" (push on the
screen) the screen when it is in the up position, if it wobbles a lot then your hinges are
probably not very good and this is poor build. Maybe try "twisting" the screen frame a
little, if your frame twists easily and a lot then this is also poor build.
5. Screen: What is the screen like, is it bright enough, does it have any dead pixels, what
size is it, what resolution did you get with it, does it have any enhanced features such as
extra bright view? Also check to see if there are certain areas with light leaks or uneven
backlighting that you can tell of?
6. Speakers: How are the speakers, is the sound loud enough, is the sound crisp enough,
would you recommend headphones or buying external speakers?
7. Processor and Performance: How fast is the performance of the notebook and what
processor do you have? Does it take long to boot up to the windows logon screen (maybe
time this), what speed is your hard drive? Mention how much memory you have as this
will effect laptop performance. Tell people if the laptop ever hangs or takes too much
time to complete a task, or if it always seems snappy for what you use it for? Do you
play games on this laptop and if so do they play okay and can you run them in the highest
graphics mode?
8. Benchmarks: Download one or more of the following free benchmark programs to
show others how your notebook performs against others

Super Pi Run this program to calculate Pi to 2 million digits of accuracy, make

sure there are minimal processes running in the background. Download:
ftp://pi.super-computing.org/windows/super_pi.zip

PCMark04 (free version) The video test might fail if your notebook has
Windows Media 10.0. Download: http://www.futuremark.com/download/?
pcmark04.shtml (there's no need to purchase the System Suite, just report the
numbers it produces in the free version such as multithreading rates, file
decryption and web page rendering times shown under the system test suite online
results)
3DMark05 This is a large download but worth it even for machines with
integrated graphics. Download: http://www.futuremark.com/download/?
3dmark05.shtml
HD Tune Run the test pattern for temp and high and low throughput speeds.
Download: http://www.hdtune.com/

We will take any benchmarks you provide and compare them to similar notebooks, you
do not have to do this, just provide your results to us.
9. Keyboard and Touchpad: How easy is the keyboard and touchpad to use, how do you
like the placement of buttons on the notebook or do you wish there were more buttons for
things such as volume control? Does the keyboard "flex" at all (this means the keyboard
sags a little bit and other keys around a key you are pressing go down as you push the
intended key)?
10. Input and Output Ports: What input ports does the laptop have, does it have USB
2.0 ports and if so how many, does it have FireWire, is there a memory card reader, can
you output to a TV with a video connector, is there a parallel port for printers?
11. Wireless: What kind of wireless did the computer come with, does it work well?
Does it have Bluetooth built-in, is there an infrared port?
12. Battery: How long does the battery last, do you wish it were longer or are you happy
with it?
13. Operating System and Software: What operating system does it come with, what
disks are provided by the manufacturer? Is there a system restore/recovery disk included,
or can you call and request one from the manufacturer? What software is included with
the computer...is the free software included good or bad?
14. Customer Support: Have you had to use the customer service support, how was it?
What form of initial contact tech support do they have phone/email/live chat? Is there a
warranty and if so what does it cover and for how long...did it cost you extra to upgrade
the warranty?
15. Complaints (optional): Do you have any specific complaints about this notebook
and if so what? How annoying is a certain problem if you do have a complaint about it?
16. Praises (optional): What do you really like about this notebook and how has it
superceded your expectations? For instance, was the price really good for what you got,

is the screen and sound better than you expected, are there little features you didnt know
about at first but learned about and came to really love?
17. Conclusion: What is your conclusion about this laptop and would you recommend it
to someone else, and if so, what type of person should buy it? List a few summary "Pros"
about the laptop for the things you really like and list a few "Cons" about the laptop for
things you think could be improved.
Contact Andrew at info@notebookreview.com for any questions.