Build Quality and Design 

Traditionally, the Dell notebooks were never considered to be the epitome of style when it comes to looks and Designs. I mean they're not as dull as the Thinkpad designs but there is a certain repetition to their overall look and design whenever a notebook comes out from them. This has been changing in recent times and the Dell Inspiron 1720 is a good example of that. The Dell comes with customisable colour, in fact 6 in total which include the standard Jet Black, alpine white, espresso brown, ruby red, midnight blue, spring green, flamingo pink, and sunshine yellow. The overall look is a cleanly and more refined designed notebook with silvery finish for the overall body.

The notebook doesn't really have that plasticky feel as previous Dell notebooks had, and this coupled with the overall refined look made the Inspiron 1720 look quite stylish and professional (that is if you didn't decide to get it in pink).  Durability wise, I found that the Dell was way much better than previous Dell models. Even the the LCD screen didn't flex much when I attempted to press it. Dell has also included media buttons on the front of the Inspiron 1720 almost like the their XPS line. In these case the media buttons do come in handy once in a while when moving a mouse or touching keypad just seems like to much effort.

Keyboard and Touchpad

What I really liked about the design of the Inspiron 1720 was it full size keyboard with its tactile and responsive feel. I liked that the CTRL key was the same size as that in a normal PC keyboard which prevented me from pressing the FN key like I usually do in most notebook keyboard layouts. These made playing FPS games much easier.

As for the touchpad, the responsiveness of it was ok though there could have been a lot more room for improvement. The size of the touchpad was large enough yet it never got in my way whenever I was typing. This meant my type cursor was never at the wrong place as a result of accidentally touching the touchpad while typing.

Ports and Connectivity

The Inspiron 1720 comes with the usual set of ports and connectivity options you'd find on notebooks. It has five USB ports (two by the side and three by the back), as well as a firewire, S-video and the normal LAN and 56K modem ports. I was quite surprised though that Dell did not include a DVI or HDMI port on the notebook and instead decided on a VGA port for display connectivity. Considering that the notebook comes with a pretty impressive onboard graphics card, you'd expect Dell to at least include a DVI port on the notebook instead of a VGA one. Even BenQ's S41 comes with a HDMI port.  As for connectivity options, the notebook comes with built in WiFi which can be switched on and off via the side button. 

Next Page: Performance & Conclusion