I had my doubts about this behemoth when it first arrived. See, notebooks are meant to be portable and this thing tops out around 8.5 pounds with all the sundries and has a 17-inch diagonal screen if you'd care to calculate dimensions. Had to use a special backpack to lug it around and finally just gave up and used the extra large APC notebook briefcase with the make-my-arm-numb shoulder strap. Funny thing is, I had my doubts about this behemoth when it first arrived. See, notebooks are meant to be portable and this thing tops out around 8.5 pounds with all the sundries and has a 17-inch diagonal screen if you’d care to calculate dimensions. Had to use a special backpack to lug it around and finally just gave up and used the extra large APC notebook briefcase with the make-my-arm-numb shoulder strap.Funny thing is, when you’re unpacking the M90 you’re thinking how you’ll never move it around and what’s all this power doing in a notebook anyway? Then you do an extended review and all of a sudden it’s the most popular notebook in the office.We used the M90 in our software office in Lake Success, New York, where it immediately got sucked into programming hands. I barely got my fingerprints on it before the Java eggheads were installing their toys. In its tenure as a programming box, the M90 ran four operating systems (Windows XP, Windows XP 64, Windows Vista and Red Hat’s Fedora Core 5) and was running a server and three test workstations internally via VMware. This made it the perfect box for use at off-site development summits. I only saw it a month or so later when we had our first trade show in Dallas. The app we’re developing is a Web 2.0 application, so at first we thought any old machine with a Web browser and an outside broadband connection would do. Until we talked to show floor management and found out that broadband connections to the show floor run almost $2000 for three days. Right around there, I decided to run the whole thing in client/server mode and just serve everything up locally. Enter the M90. We had a full server and workstation setup at the booth, but only the M90 was strong enough to run both the server stuff (Apache, Tomcat, the whole 9 yards) and a local as well as virtual client. That came in handy when we had to attend out-of-booth workshops and such. THE SPECS Dell categorizes the M90 as a portable workstation, truly a member of its Precision line of high-end business desktops–and they’re right. We got our M90 last summer and the box came with a 2.16GHz Core Duo, 2GB of RAM, a 100GB SATA hard disk, and an nVidia Quadro FX 1500M mobile video card with 512MB of dedicated RAM.Today, you’ve still got the FX 1500 as an option, but you can also opt for a slightly less muscled version with only 256MB of RAM. Important thing to remember about these nVidia cards is that they’re built for OpenGL work, which means that while roving programmers love the box, roving CAD developers are going to love it, too. Especially considering the M90’s 17-inch high-end display, which is capable of 1920×1200 or 1440×900 resolution depending on which video screen option you select (WUXGA is the high end, WXGA is the default).You’ve got all the networking options you want, including 10/100/1000 gigabit on the wired side and 802.11a-g on the wireless. The M90s also have the option of internal CDMA connectivity, meaning you can simply sign up for a Verizon Ev-Do wireless broadband account and the M90 (as well as its brethren) can take that account information and connect directly–no need for a dedicated PC Card. Highly sweet. But those are only two ports on the M90’s bulky chassis–Dell didn’t waste any space, however. You’ll also find VGA, S-Video and DVI ports for all you external video needs; six USB 2.0 and one FireWire port for all your peripheral needs; a PC Card slot that also supports the new Express Card standard, a Smart Card reader and a 4-in-1 Media Card reader. Basically, if it talks to a PC, it talks to the M90–which can really save your bacon on the road when you’re bumping into strange external projectors, new digi-cams or storage devices. Though, I would have liked one of the 8-in-1 media readers, but that’s a minor quibble.Our 100GB SATA disk was the high-end option back then, but now you can jump a step higher to 120GB. See that could be 200GB to make me really happy, but I suppose that has to wait until the SATA folks get an interface working for mobile disks of that size. Dell has a 160GB option, but then you lose SATA’s speed bonus and drop down to a regular 5400rpm ATA disk. Feed the speed.CPUs have seen the biggest change since the unit we reviewed. RAM still maxes out at 4GB of DDR2 RAM, but CPU choices immediately dumped the Core Duo and moved to Core 2 Duo when that chip became available. Now you can opt for Core 2 Duo silicon starting at 1.83GHz up to 2.33GHz. Performance, obviously, rocked. Where it will disappoint is battery life–but then again if you were looking for stellar battery life after opening this box, then you were smoking funny cigarettes. This is a lot of hardware and it’s going to take a lot of juice. Then again, it’s not hugely terrible either. We got about two and a half hours with an average workload. No, that won’t manage a five-hour cross-country flight, but then again this box is so big that you can’t get it open in an economy seat anyway. If you’ve got first class, you’ll have the space for a backup notebook battery, like those from APC, or an airline power jack. And outside of an airplane, most users are going to be using an M90 at some kind of work site so battery life really isn’t required that often. THE UPSHOT It’s big, bad and beautiful. It’s also tough even with all its high-end hardware, surviving six airline experiences and countless take-home trips with no hiccup whatever. It also managed four operating systems during its tenure with us and never had a driver issue, other than having to find the right nVidia driver for Fedora and some less-than-advanced video drivers for the same card under Vista RC1. But everything ran with a minimum of hassle considering that tasks we set the machine. For power-user needs in a business setting, we didn’t encounter any notebook that came close to the M90 across the eight other notebook reviews we did in 2006. Highly recommended Technology Industry