Dell Inspiron 700M
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| Design |  |
| Features | |
| Performance |  |
The Dell 700M Laptop is a little beast boasting a powerful processor and a 12.1″ widescreen monitor. It’s best features are it’s light weight (5 lb’s) and it’s small size.
Dell 700M Laptop Design
The Dell Inspiron 700m is unlike any other Inspiron. The 700m’s top is a very pale silver and almost white in color. There are some white trimmings on this mini laptop so it has a clean look and borrows the styling of Apple�s PowerBook.
Dell 700M Laptop Features
As far as the heat/noise factor, this laptop does not heat up as bad as others do and it’s fan is very quiet. The built-in laptop speakers don’t provide much base and don’t sound good at high volumes, so expect to use earphones when listening to music on this machine.
Dell 700M Laptop Performance
Pentium M 745(1.8Ghz); Windows XP Home Edition; 512MB DDR SDRAM; 60GB Hard Drive; 4200rpm; 12.1″ WXGA, 1280×800; DVD+RW; Travel Weight: 5 lbs.; System Weight: 4 lbs.; Dell 802.11g; Intel 82855 GME, 64MB; S-Video, VGA, USB 2.0, Firewire.
What’s included in the package
Included with the Dell Inspiron 700M laptop is some start-up CD’s, user manual, laptop, remote control (for music / DVD play), A/C adapter.
Conclusion
The Dell 700M Laptop is not the ideal laptop if you’re looking for a traveling notebook, as it’s battery can die out at just over 2 hours. The best part is the SD memory card reader, perfect for viewing & transferring your digital camera pictures. The nice design, clean look and crisp & clear 12.1″ screen makes the Dell Inspiron 700M laptop a good overall buy.
February 28th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
Except that it will NOT work with SD cards over 512MB!! Dell knows this is an existing problem, yet has not updated the driver since 2004!
Way to go, Dell!
May 2nd, 2006 at 6:45 am
Well i bought mine (700m) in summer last year and from the beginning have been useing it with a 1Gig SD card i allso use in my palm pilot.. no problems..
June 16th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
I bought a Dell 700m in June 2005. It does recognize a 1 GB SD
card but not a 2 GB or a 4 GB card. Does anyone know if Dell
has addressed this problem yet?
August 19th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
is anyone else having problems with the ipod nano and their inspiron 700m? it says device not recognized when i plug the ipod in. if i disable usb 2.0 then it works ok! pain in the ass!!!
August 22nd, 2006 at 5:10 am
Yeah, just tried to put in a 2gb SD card in it today…no luck.
September 1st, 2006 at 4:21 pm
I’m also interested in hearing whether Dell fixes this. I have a 4GB SD card I’d like to use in it.
November 10th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
I�m at Dell Headquarters in Austin, Texas and I just wanted to post an update to this. I’ve been in contact with the engineer in charge of this and received word that the necessary driver update has completed testing and is in it’s final stages. While unable to guarantee an exact date, I was told that packaging is all that remains to be done with the driver and it should be available for download within the next few weeks. I’ll continue to pursue this and return to this thread with any updates I receive but more than likely my next post will be a link to the driver.
November 28th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
The USB ports on my 700m are very loose and my local computer shop says they cannot be fixed. That seems a bit strange, any comments?
December 7th, 2006 at 6:14 am
I have a 700m and just tried a 2GB SD and it will not read it either. I just got off of “Dell chat” and the support tech sent me to this site for a fix. Has anyone heard back from Neil since the 10th of last month?
December 7th, 2006 at 9:04 pm
hi people, the fix is in, download driver dated 12/4/06 and it will address the reader problem, I have confirmed this with my 2gb card. download the driver and the woes will go away.
December 7th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Glad to know there’s a fix out there. Anybody got a link to the driver?
December 11th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
I was sent to the following link. If the link does not work go to dell support “Download and Drivers”, put in your service tag, click on “Find Downloads”, click on “Chipset”, and select “Texas Instruments PCI7420 Flash Memory/SD Reader” and download. The only problem I have is the download file crashes on install so I still have not got it running yet!
Here’s the link.
December 13th, 2006 at 8:14 pm
As ‘Mick Turl’ said, the USB ports are prone to damage. After only a few months of using a USB mouse, the USB ports became very loose. Now I never use the ports except when I absolutely must use a thumb drive for class. I have to hold the drive in place or the computer will stop reading it…. very annoying!!
December 15th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
Love it, love it! small enough to fit in my pack pack and still not weigh me down. Havent had any technical difficulties other than the fact that it has slowed down due to all my programs i’ve got stuffed in there.
December 23rd, 2006 at 10:48 am
Hi the driver installed for me. But before I go buy a higher capacity SD card, can anyone verify if a 4GB or 8GB SD will work ?
December 25th, 2006 at 8:41 pm
I have had this laptop for about three years now. I’ve been using it at law school and around my house. The only problem I’ve had (and it is a pretty big one) is that the speaker wire runs through the lid and after many openings and closings it became crimped and the speakers do not work anymore. I have read on other sites where people have had the same problem.
December 28th, 2006 at 8:39 am
tauhabib, I presume that the upgrade driver loaded. I get an installscript engine failure. Do you know what version of the script engine you have on your machine? Dell is absolutely no help in resolving this issue.
December 28th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
For those of you having trouble loading the SD card reader update, I finally got it to work using the Device Manager. If you go this route, open System in the Control Panel and then click on the Hardware tab. Open the directory “PCMCIA and Flash Memory Devices and double click the “Texas Instruments PCIxx20 Integrated FlashMedia Controller”. Click on the Driver tab and then select Update Driver. At this point in time, I had to specifically select the directory where the revised driver was located on my hard drive which for me was C:\Dell\Drivers\R139212\Windows\tiinst. Once I did that the driver was automatically updated. I then installed a 2GB SD card and it read it with no problem. I hope the above is helpful and if not please post and I will try to clarify the steps. I hope all of these posts were not too much of a bother!
January 5th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
hey, my sd card reader doesnt work at all…it tries and fails to fomat the card everytime, and while it recognizes that it’s there, it wont read it at all. ive tried numerous cards and downloaded and redownloaded the drivers. i even trired to install the driver in the way that don described above. nothing works…anyone have any ideas?
January 11th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Totally love my 700m…havent had any issues with it other than the fact that i’ve bombarded it with tons of stuff and is now sluggish..aggghh!
January 20th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Hey all,
I have a Acer which seems to have the same problem with the memory card reader (I haven’t had any luck with the Acer customer support yet). I was wondering if someone could help me out by sending me the updated driver?
Cheers.
January 28th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Dell tech support is horrible. I had to find this site myself while on Dell tech support chat and tell tech support how to fix the problem that I was calling in about. All he could keep saying was that it wasn’t compatible. I sent him the forum from this website and he cancelled my chat session.
I would just like to say thanks for everybody looking into the 700m SD card reader problem and this should help for anybody else. Hopefully dell will put this in their trouble shooting quey so their tech support staff will have something else to say besides it’s not compatible.
February 28th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
The driver was just what the doctor ordered. It installed fine just from the setup - didn’t have to go the ‘driver update’ route. Can now read my new 2 gig card.
Thanks to all for the discussion of the problem and the link to the new driver.
March 21st, 2007 at 10:24 am
After installing Vista on my 700m, the usb doesn’t work with my external hdd (WD 320GB) nor my iPod
Anybody has any idea about this??
May 2nd, 2007 at 7:39 am
I’ve had my 700m for over 2 years now and had no problems until the USB stopped working. Apparently there is a big problem with the Dell’s USB ports. I was thinking of buying a pcmcia usb card and just use that - any other solutions??
May 10th, 2007 at 9:22 am
Perfect! This is exactly what mine needed. A quick fix to without any problems.
June 25th, 2007 at 6:11 am
My only problems are the speaker thing as someone had mentioned before, AND mt NIC is now shot after 2 years. Had to get a wireless modem sent over from my ISP and had to buy a PCM/CIA card just to use for 5 min. while I got my wireless domain set up, ugh…
December 16th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
Has anyone’s screen failed? My 700m is about 2 years old. Now the screen goes black about 5 minutes after booting up and I have to switch to an external monitor.
January 15th, 2008 at 3:05 am
i’ve had my 700m for over two years. i’ve never had any problems really. nothing major. but now my usb ports are not working properly. when plugging in any device into the top port a message comes up saying the device is not recognized. sometimes the same happens in the bottom port. though usually the bottom port recognizes devices as usb 1.1. i’ve read about many people having similar issues. does anyone have some solution which has solved this usb problem? thanks.
January 15th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Mateo - I’ve got the same problem. Had mine for 3 yrs. Did get it fixed by Dell Support Tech over th ephne 2 months ago by uninstalling USB via Device Manager and then restarting, go to set up (F9) and loading factory defaults. But it has happened again and this procedure won’t work. There is much on the web about this problem - but no real asnswers. A lot of people and Dell say it’s a motherboard problem but I got it working last time withot a MB change. Some people also say its a software incompability issue - but I haven’t installed any recent software. Anyone else got any ideas? PLEASE……
January 19th, 2008 at 2:32 am
RAC, thanks for the info. I tried uninstalling the USB drivers, I set the bios to its factory defaults settings, restored system to previous configuration (system restore), downloaded USB drivers from Dell and elsewhere, and still nothing. Top USB doesn’t recognize any device, and the bottom acts as a 1.1. I will either take my laptop to get it servised (though it wont be Dell who does this because I am no longer under warranty) or I will do a clean install of windows (again) and see where that takes me. Though I really don’t like the second options, let alone the first. Without USB life is a just little more difficult =/
January 19th, 2008 at 2:34 am
RAC, thanks for the info. I tried uninstalling the USB drivers, I set the bios to its factory defaults settings, restored system to previous configuration (system restore), downloaded USB drivers from Dell and elsewhere, and still nothing. Top USB doesn’t recognize any device, and the bottom acts as a 1.1. I will either take my laptop to get it servised (though it wont be Dell who does this because I am no longer under warranty) or I will do a clean install of windows (again) and see where that takes me. Though I really don’t like the second options, let alone the first. Without USB life is a just little more difficult =/
January 24th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Downloaded the driver for the “Texas Instruments PCI7420 Flash Memory/SD Reader” and that allowed me to update the driver and solved the problem with the SD reader not working on my 700m.
August 6th, 2008 at 5:15 am
hi sorry take the issue back to the card reader but for some reason my comp wont recognize the new driver i have one from 7-4-08 a few months older the problem that im having is that i cant read my 4gb sd card im good up to 2 gb but 4gb i get the error message saying to reformat and with no luck i found another work around but the problem is that the driver poted on that site is no longer avaliable and if any one has it or knows where i can find i would be really grateful if they could let me know
thanks
mike
ohh and here is the site with the work around
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/517257.html