Dell Inspiron 3800

Specifications

The screen is excellent - no bad pixels.
It's fast.
It's well built, small and light.
It's a nice colour (blue).
The battery life is excellent - I usually get around 3 hours use on one battery.
The built-in speakers are very good.
There is a touchpad AND pointing stick.
It works extremely well with Windows 2000 and supports ACPI.
Software DVD playback with PowerDVD and WinDVD is excellent, and it can be connected to a TV.
Absolutely reliable (apart from the infrared port). Never crashes.
You can hotswap the DVD and FDD while the system is on (using Win2K or supplied software with Win98).

On arrival, the floppy disk drive was jammed into the media bay. This made it impossible to swap it with the DVD-ROM drive. I also had problems early on with the i3800 spontaneously rebooting itself (memory problem). After calling Dell, it was collected the next day and returned working a few days later.
The infrared port does not work very well. It worked when I first got the i3800, but soon started suffering from an intermittent problem where the infrared port failed after the computer had been on for a few hours. I sent it back for repair, and the motherboard was replaced. It took 2 weeks to repair it - they did not have any motherboards in stock! The infrared port has worked intermittently since then. I have given up on it now, and bought a cable to connect my infrared device! I have now upgraded to Windows 2000. Due to the poor infrared support in Windows 2000, I haven't used infrared since!
The built-in modem is very unreliable. For example, if you try to connect to the Internet, and your ISP is engaged, you can only retry once more before it stops working for good! (or until you reboot). Dell weren't able to resolve this problem. Fortunately my ISP isn't engaged very often.

Would I buy another Dell? - Yes! (I hope I was just unlucky with mine...)

Will I ever use infrared again? - No! (I guess Bluetooth is on its way anyway...)