Dell Ships Second Pair of Duo Notebooks

Dell on Tuesday posted another pair of Core Duo-powered notebooks to its sales site, the third and fourth models from the Texas manufacturer to feature Intel's newest dual-core chip.

The Inspiron E1505, which is sold at Dell's Home & Home Office site, and the Inspiron 6400, which targets small business users, are actually the same 6-pound machine equipped with a 15.4-inch display, integrated graphics and wireless, and a fixed optical drive that, unlike those in other Dell notebooks, can't be removed.

Windows XP Media Center ships with the consumer-oriented E1505, while the 6400's default OS is Windows XP Home.

Both models are available today, and currently priced starting at $779 for a Core Duo processor, $729 with a single processor core, when equipped with 512MB of memory and 40GB drive.

Dell's out-the-gate Duo notebooks, the E1705 and 9400, both of which feature a 17-inch LCD, are priced at $1,049 and up.Intel unwrapped the laptop-oriented Duo in January to some fanfare, particularly since Apple's first Intel-based desktop iMacs, which were unveiled shortly thereafter, use the processor.

Other recent news about Intel's Core Duo, however, hasn't been bright. Microsoft, for instance, recently confirmed that it's working on a fix for a battery draining problem on notebooks running the processor. The problem, which was passed along to manufacturers in July 2005 but not made public, drains batteries faster than expected because it prevents machines from entering "sleep" states.