Oct 18
2008A History of the Dell Inspiron Line
Filed Under (Computers) by Fabian Toulouse on 18-10-2008
Tagged Under : Computers
Dell Computers revolutionized the ‘custom built’ PC market as we know it today. Michael Dell famously started his multi-national business from his humble University of Texas dorm room. Dell has managed to establish a reputation for hitting the sweet spot of price and performance for most users, and regularly updates their brand lines to match the latest specifications.
The two brands of Dell laptops are the business-centric Dell Latitudes, which usually boost RAM, battery life and disk drive space at the expense of video card, and the Inspiron line. The Inspiron line sacrifices battery life and RAM for a better video experience. Inspiron laptops are geenrally geared towards college students and ‘consumer’ laptop users.
Starting from the first Inspirons in the early ‘90, the line has sold well. They were never the cutting edge of performance for Dell laptops, but they were usually comparable to a 6 to 9 month old ‘top of the laptop’ at a good price point. Early Inspirons came with the Celeron 1.4 GHz processor, and then got a line refresh in the early 2000s with a Pentium M, which was quickly supplanted by the Centrino processor. During this span of time, the motherboards also grew in capabilities, adding more USB ports, onboard power management, and the batteries grew denser in terms of their energy storage capabilities. It was the higher density batteries that caused the laptop recall of mid 2006, as the new batteries could result in significant overheating, damaging internal components on the motherboard, or potentially, burst into flame on a high run charge cycle.
A persistent problem with the Inspiron line involves a tab applying pressure to one of the chips on the motherboard. When pressure is applied consistently to the left side of the lower edge of the keyboard is slowly breaks soldering links from the chip to the motherboard. Symptoms included random shutdowns of the computer. This was eventually settled with a class action lawsuit, and many Inspiron 5150s were recalled as a result.
Subsequently, Dell completed a thorough overhaul of their manufacturing facilities. Indeed, there was talk about selling some of their manufacturing plants and hiring third party manufacturers to cover the costs. The overhaul of their manufacturing process has seemingly paid off. The newest lines of Dell Inspirons have not suffered from the same problems. There are currently several Inspiron models available, ranging from the budget conscious 13″ notebook market, to the behemoth 17″ widescreen laptops. These models are typical Inspirons: they are not geared towards the cutting-edge consumer (Dell acquired the Alienware brand for that market). Dell Inspirons are meant to be a good value notebook.
