Living with a cheap laptop

Almost one year ago I bought a brand new DELL Inspiron 15 laptop for just £166. You can see my original review here. So it was time to give an update especially after my recent disappointing review of the DELL Latitude E3550 laptop. What can you expect for just a quarter of the price?

Quite a lot actually. If you just want a basic, laptop for email, web-surfing, photo editing and 2D gaming it does really well. Boots up quickly, connects to the Internet and provided you don't expect it to do more than one thing at time it remains responsive. Battery life is excellent too. It did come with Windows 8.1 but with the prospect of Windows 10 coming out next month and a free upgrade that will help a lot. As the warranty will be out, I'll upgrade it with a cheap 128Gb SSD as well.

I love this laptop and it does brilliantly for the price. DELL must have sold containers of them over the last Christmas holiday period! However shortly after that Microsoft withdrew its free Windows offer in Europe for this class of system and then they quickly disappeared. However if you look for the equivalent Lenovo which includes a DVD writer as well you can still find them for £169.

DELL Latitude E3550 laptop disappointing

I've just purchased a new DELL Latitude E3550 laptop for a customer and I'm disappointed with it compared to it's predecessor the E3540. The first obvious difference on inspection was the DVD writer is missing and as there is no space for it, it is not even an option. You will require an external DVD to load programs, rip music CDs or watch DVD films. I can understand that in a cheaper consumer laptop that this is standard or even for a small business laptop or ultrabook this is a necessity but in a large-screen, business laptop costing well over £650 this is just not acceptable.

Also compared to the previous model the hard disk drive is no longer the hybrid version with and integrated small SSD cache. Performance does seem to suffer and the slight increase that the latest Intel i5-5200U 'Broadwell' processor is also not spectacular. The hard disk activity light is missing and the power button has a small stripe power mark but no light making it difficult to see if the laptop is asleep or hibernating. The 15.6" display standard resolution is OK but not great. Again evidence of cost-cutting in the design and although the overall build quality is good, the touch pad rattles. On the plus side; keyboard lighting appears to be standard.

DELL have seen to be dropping the ball recently and this laptop if evidence that all is not well in the design and product marketing departments. I have switched my recent purchases to Lenovo for both desktops and laptops and will continue to do so until DELL get their act together again.