Days without a working battery: 13

Although I remain impressed with the machine itself, I am currently extremely unimpressed by Dell's after-sales support.

After the battery failed out of warranty, Dell sold me a replacement battery for £105. The battery turned out to be the wrong type for the Inspiron 9400 and won't charge (Dell's own diagnostics report the battery they supplied as a counterfeit battery!).

I have had no reply to my emails to Dell support.

My Dell Inspiron 9400 - one of the first dual-core processor laptops.

The spec for this machine was pretty much determined by just one application: photo editing.

Dealing with RAW files which are then converted to TIFF, with a typical size of 60Mb, meant a beefy processor, plenty of RAM and a large, hi-res screen.

So, T2300 dual-core processor, 1Gb RAM, 80Gb hard drive and a 17" 1920x1200 screen.

After reading a tonne of reviews, and seeking advice on a number of forums, there was near universal agreement on one thing: where bang for your buck is concerned, it's hard to beat Dell. And for my needs, a lot of people were pointing me to the Inspiron 9300.

However, that still left one question: do I buy the 9300 now, or wait for a dual-core machine? Dual-core is a twin-processor machine with both processors embedded into a single chip. Intel claims that dual-core processors provide a 68% boost in speed. Most benchtests show something closer to 30%, but that is far more than is gained by stepping up to the next clock-speed, and definitely a gain that is not to be sniffed at.

Fortunately, Dell solved my dilemma rather speedily by bringing out the Inspiron 9400 - a dual-core processor version of the 9300. :-)

Dell seemed to have different freebie upgrades every time I visited the site, so I kept hitting it until the right deal came along: namely an upgrade to the higher-res 1920x1200 screen with 1Gb RAM. I plan a visit to Crucial to upgrade to 2Gb.

So, what's it like in practice? Let's start with speed, and the best test for that is opening a RAW file from my D200. These are 10Mb files containing the raw data captured by the sensor. Unlike JPEGs, the camera does not convert it to a photo file - that is left to the computer to do later. On my Vaio, opening a RAW file took around 10 seconds. On the Dell, it is less than 1 second.

Dual-core processors are 28% more power-efficient than conventional processors, but a machine like this is still very power-hungry. I thus opted for the upgraded 9-cell 80WHr battery. This gives a claimed battery-life of 8 hours and a real-world life of 4.5-5 hours.

An 80Gb hard drive gives plenty of headroom, but my photos are stored on external Lacie 250Gb firewire drives. Offsite backup is on DVD, created using the Dell's 8x DVD writer.

The machine was designed as a multimedia PC and runs Windows XP Media Centre Edition. The screen size makes it perfect for watching DVDs, made more convenient by the front-panel controls that are rapidly becoming the norm on multimedia laptops:

As a travel companion, it is obviously not as convenient as the Vaio, but it fits into my roller-bag, and that's really all it needs to do.

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