I also decided to benchmark my Inspiron 9800 machine (Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.86GHz, 1 GB memory) using SiSoftware Sandra 2004. Fully defragged, just rebooted with most user-related background processes turned off (using the Startup 3rd party control panel) while on the Maximum Performance power scheme (and on mains power) and got the following CPU figures:

Model : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.86GHz

Dhrystone ALU : 3400 MIPS
Whetstone FPU : 1101 MFLOPS
Whetstone iSSE2 : 1408 MFLOPS

Processor

Speed : 798MHz
Performance Rating : PR958 (estimated)
Type : Mobile
L2 On-board Cache : 2MB ECC Synchronous, ATC, 8-way set, 64 byte line size

Chipset 1
Model : Dell Computer Corp ??? (2590)
Front Side Bus Speed : 4x 100MHz (400MHz data rate)

Features
SSE2 Technology : Yes
SSE3 Technology : No
HTT - Hyper-Threading Technology : No

==

According to Sandra, the reference CPU is more than twice as fast:

Dhrystone ALU : 7747 MIPS
Whetstone FPU : 2499 MFLOPS
Whetstone iSSE2 : 3198 MFLOPS

To double-check, I looked for other benchmarks online:

http://www.netzwelt.de/news/70888_3-dell-inspiron-9300-im-test.html

Dhrystone ALU 9.171 MIPS Whetstone FPU 2.954 MFLOPS Whetstone iSSE2 3.785 MFLOPS

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/492756.html

Dhrystone: 6765
Whetstone iSSE2: 2820
Whetstone FPU: 2178

(That one is with a 1.60GHZ CPU, yet still faster than mine)

From what I can see, my CPU is also severely underperforming, but I guess it is possible there is another explanation?

P.