Dell Inspiron 15, Affordable & Powerful
The focus in the laptop market has shifted slightly over the last year or so. Mini laptops, or netbooks, are now a growing trend among laptop and portable device sales. While these ultra portable devices may be gaining favor with consumers, there are still many who need the power that a full sized laptop can bring. In this laptop review I want to focus on the Dell Inspiron 15.
I chose the Inspiron 15 for a few reasons: one, it’s one of Dell’s more affordable models, two, it’s got enough power to run your applications and three, it’s one of Dell’s longest running and best selling series of laptops, so many people have heard the name Inspiron. While you might think the third one is trivial, for a lot of people, precedent still plays a large role in their purchasing decision and I want to make sure that those who are looking at the Inspiron for this reason know what they are looking at.
First off, in the power department, the laptop ships with a Celeron 900 processor, which features 1Mb cache, 2,28Ghz processor and an 800Mhz front side bus. For a laptop, that’s a pretty well equipped machine. It’s enough juice to run both your office apps as well as multimedia applications, such as iTunes and Windows Media Player. The unit ships with 3Gb RAM installed, which again is enough to handle office as well as multimedia applications and content.
For storage, the Inspiron 15 comes standard with 250Gb hard drive. While that’s becoming a smaller number, relative to the size of the drives found in many higher end and desktop machines, it’s still a lot of space for movies and music and the like. The computer also ships with a CD/DVD burner, which support DVD + and -R as well as dual layer discs.
Standard on the Inspiron 15 is an on-board Intel graphics chip. This will handle most multimedia applications and desktop use, but may lag a bit for high end gaming.
There is a built in web-cam, as well as Skype pre-installed on the system, for those of you who like to do the whole online video chat thing. There’s also a built in wireless-G adapter, which will allow you to connect wirelessly anywhere there’s a wifi connection available.
All of the specs listed here are upgradable, but I just wanted to represent the basic system as it would ship from Dell. While a lot of people will choose to upgrade various parts of the system, many people also don’t want to bother with that & just want to know if what they get right out of the box will do what they need.
Bottom Line: the Dell Inspiron 15 is a good option for those who need a desktop relacement for the road. If you’ve got kids going to college in the fall, this is one that you could consider and know that they will be able to do all their homework, as well as connect with friends on Facebook and everything else. If you’re a businessperson who’s looking for a device for the road, this should suit you just fine. You can run any office application on this system, as well as multimedia presentation and video conferencing, etc. For home users who are looking for a laptop instead of a desktop, again this will work for you. If you’re a one computer type of person, and have a slightly bigger budget, you may want to consider upgrades to the processor or possibly a slightly more powerful base model, but that’s only if you’re replacing your entire desktop setup with this machine. All in all, you get a good deal for a fair price with this Dell laptop.
07/7/2010
— Filed under: Hardware
Tags: Dell Inspiron 15, laptop
