Dell Inspiron B120 Notebook
The Ispiron B120 will serve you well if your needs are modest, and games and video performance are not a big issue. It is sturdy with a reasonably bright screen and good power management options. If you add more software to the computer, it will slowing down particularly during booting and screen refreshes and in the page file activity. You can add more memory and take the video up 64 MB of the 256 MB. You can use Infineon 256 MB module purchased from Dell to pair with the original 256 MB. This will work nicely altough more expensive than buying from other sources. The speakers are quite tinny, with audible distortion and do not play very loud, but the sound quality was extremely good if you use an earphones. If you want to watch DVD movies and music, perhaps relying on the earphone/headphone would be more fruitful than the built-in speakers.
The Dell B120 specs:
Processor : Celeron M360 (1.4Ghz)
Memory : 256 MB RAM
Display : 14,1″ wide screen
Hard Drive : 40 GB Harddrive
Optical Drive : CD-R/RW/DVD ROM
Battery : 4 cell Li ion
The keyboard is nice. The tochpad is joy to use. One must not shy away from utilizing the additional features and functions of the touchpad, 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. And be prepared to customize and fiddle with the adjustments of the selections and scrolling.
The CD-ROM is quiet speedy and sensitive to CD imperfections. The CD tray was a bit flimsy, and 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 fulll edition.
When i comparize B120 with Hitachi Flora 3010 that use Pentium 90 Mhz and 40 MB memory, and run Super Pi benchmark, i found that in Pi value up to 16K digits the B120 needs just 3 seconds and Flora 3010 12 seconds. In Pi value 512K, B120 only needs 25 seconds and Flora 3010 needs 15 minutes 18 seconds. With Pi value 4M, B120 only 4 minutes 51 seconds but Flora 3010 needs 3 hours 2 minutes 35 seconds. In 32M of Pi value, B120 needs 51 minutes 19 secondds and Flora 3010 not done. 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. Lithium ion batteries might charge faster, may not suffer from memory problems but the need still something with a longer lifespan.
This B120 only runs warm and not hot. The best posture to use a notebook is 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.
If you add more software in this notebook, it will slowing down particularly during booting and screen refreshes and in the page file activity. It was time to add more memory and given that the video took up 64 MB of the 256 MB. You can tried an Infineon 256 MB module purchased from Dell to pair with the original 256 MB. This worked very nicely. With 512 MB on-board, the computer works quite fast and the hard drive gets a lot of rest.
There’s a fact that the computer was not shutting down unless you hit the shutdown or restart options twice. Maybe some application hogging the resources and not shutting down in the first go. But we must not forget the fact that the Dell Inspiron B120 is an inexpensive notebook, and an extremely good value for students.
