The inner workings of a Dell Inspiron 700m

How did Dell squeeze such an abundant number of functions, including an optical drive, into a svelte, 12.1in wide-screen-LCD form factor that is only 1.5in thick and weighs a shade more than 4lbs?

1. A mini-PCI (peripheral-component-interconnect) connector provides the means by which Wi-Fi support appends to the Inspiron 700m. This system configuration employs a Broadcom BCM94318 transceiver; Dell also optionally shipped the Inspiron 700m with Intel-sourced 80.11g connectivity. Broadcom’s BCM440x IC supports 10/100-Mbps wired-Ethernet services. The system even includes a rarely seen nowadays 56-kbps analog modem. For external-display connectivity, Dell supplies VGA and S-Video-connector options.

2. A second-generation, 1.6-GHz Pentium M 725 Dothan processor, which Intel fabricated on a 90-nm lithography process, powers this Inspiron 700m. The processor has a 2-Mbyte L2 cache and mates to the first-generation 855GME core-logic chip set. The Pentium M CPU was a much-needed mobile success story for Intel after its mostly underwhelming NetBurst predecessor, and the Pentium M’s power-optimized microarchitecture influence subsequently spread throughout the company’s product line.

3. The Inspiron 700m does not embed Bluetooth capabilities; dual USB (Universal Serial Bus) 2 ports provide one means of augmentation, and industrious hackers have also figured out how to internally embed this feature by tapping into USB. The system also supports IEEE 1394, or Firewire, along with module-based peripheral expansion through PC Card and SD (secure-digital) Card slots. ExpressCard slots now supersede PC cards.

Dual SODIMM (small-outline dual inline-memory-module) slots—one under the keyboard and the other on the bottom of the system—each accept as much as 1 Gbyte of DDR333 PC2700 SDRAM. The 2 Gbytes of aggregate maximum system memory is sufficient for Windows XP and Linux, but Windows Vista and Windows 7 would find it lacking.

The Inspiron 700m employs the now-obsolete PATA (parallel-advanced-technology-attachment) interface for both the hard-disk drive and rewritable-DVD drive. The performance gap between PATA and more modern SATA (serial ATA) is largely evident only when doing burst transfers into and out of the drives’ RAM buffers. Nonetheless, the simplified cabling topology that SATA’s few-wire interface incurs is particularly attractive in cramped-quarters designs. Although its Merlot bath caused the system to fail, its hard drive was intact, and, by removing it and installing it in a USB2 enclosure, I was subsequently able to recover all of its data.

So what happened to this Inspiron 700m? A dearth of red-stained evidence in the photograph might incorrectly lead you to conclude that the system is completely functional. However, the error messages I obtain when the laptop usually fails to completely boot, along with the fact that none of the USB-based peripherals function the few times it does complete booting, suggest that the wine flowed out of the overturned glass and into the left-hand USB ports, where it subsequently fried the core-logic chip-set circuitry