Laptops Arena

The performances of Dell’s Inspiron 15” show it to be a notebook close to most of all-purpose laptops available on the market. The design even if it’s basic presents on the inside components having a glossy piano-black touch, whereas the keyboard has a matte feel displayed on a large width with its silent keys cozy while typing. The touchpad measures 1.8 x 3.0 inches and is as matte as the keyboard.

The device is equipped with evenly distributed on its two sides 3 USB 3.0 ports, VGA out, Ethernet, headphone and microphone ports, an Express Card/34 slot, and 7-in-1 memory card reader. But unfortunately no HDMI port is present and neither a webcam.

The display is 16:9 large, a 1366 x 768 resolution, with extra pixels that enable it for multitasking, watching movies, but no LED-backlit option. The speaker strip is loud enough that at median setting presents a quite good volume, no needing to play louder.

As to its performance Dell Inspiron 15” is available with Intel Core 2 Duo processors, configured with a 2.0-GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core T4200 CPU. The 3GB of RAM capacity booted the Windows Vista in 47 seconds. For transferring files it proves a rate of 18.8 MBps which is ranged among the average for the notebooks of this size. Transcoding a 5:05 MPEG-4 clip to AVI lasts 9 minutes and 8 seconds, that makes four minutes slower than the average notebook, but much faster than the netbook average, which is 29:10.

Dell Inspiron 15” has a graphics of Intel GMA X4500HD, that scored 767 on 3DMark06 on the graphics benchmark. The graphics for games however is rendered by only 5 frames per second, even if the resolution is set for its maximum. But this is not a reason not to be used in everyday computing.

The device is powered by 6-cell battery that lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, showing it to be in the average range of its category. Dell Inspiron 15” comes with Dell Dock for launching programs which is composed of simple colorful icons when activated open a submenu of tasks. Next follow the DataSafe Online and DataSafe Local Backup which enables users to create disks to recover and restore the notebook for its factory settings.

The software already preinstalled displays a McAfee Security Center, Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Compatibility Pack and PowerPoint 2007, PowerDVD DX, Roxio Creator DE, Windows Life Essentials and Yahoo Toolbar. To set a configuration, the device can reach it at Dell.com, where base configuration incorporates Windows Vista Basic. To upgrade for Vista Home Premium (32bit or 64bit), users have to pay an extra $30.00.

Hard drive sizes go from 160GB to 500GB at a price of $125; upgrading to ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 graphics with dedicated video memory of 256MB, requires a $100 extra cost.

As a conclusion, since Dell Inspiron 15” got tested, we can say that Inspiron 15” presents itself as a notebook worth buying for the ones that are on budget and they need light computing to perform on.