Ram Dell Dimension

Dell Inspiron 15R laptop

Design and features

Also known as the N5010, the Inspiron 15R makes us think of the days when iMacs were candy coloured. Our review sample came in shiny, glossy blue with a hint of brushed aluminium underneath that immediately inspired thoughts of Willy Wonka's factory. Despite this, it feels a little cheap and plastic, and not as solid as the other sub-AU$1000 laptops we've seen recently. In Australia, the 15R can also be bought in black, red and pink.

It's also worth mentioning the monitor hinges here — rather than sitting along the edge of the laptop it's slightly indented, protecting it against any potential nicks and bumps.

Open the laptop up and you're greeted with a shiny brushed aluminium finish, which by all rights should be attractive, but ends up being dull, approaching a gunmetal grey colour. The keyboard is black, with the keys running edge-to-edge, eschewing the island-style trend of its competitors. There's a horizontally squashed numpad to the right with dedicated Home/End and Pg Up/Pg Dn keys, and, as seems to be in vogue, the F keys are now activated with the Fn button, whereas secondary functions like volume and brightness control have been shifted up to primary.

Dell includes Synaptics' multi-touch touch pad, meaning you get useful gestures like swiping with two fingers to scroll. You also get pinch to zoom and rotate, although Windows doesn't take great advantage of it outside of Photo Viewer. We also found that it gets easily confused, performing a zoom when you want to rotate.

The "flick" gesture is better, which allows you to swipe three fingers either left or right to browse through photos or go back and forward in a browser, but it's very finicky and nowhere near as polished as Apple's solution.

It also includes something called "My Favorites Gesture", which will launch any number of your favourite programs when you hold three fingers on the pad. We'd much prefer Asus' implementation in the K52F, where you can set a double- or triple-finger tap to either middle or right mouse button.

Specs and connections

If there's one thing Dell is good at, it's packing in higher specced hardware than usual at a certain price point.

Powered on a Core i3-330M @ 2.13GHz (Dell now sells the 15R with a 350M at the lowest level) and sporting the requisite DVD±RW drive, Dell's also managed to pack in 4GB RAM, a 500GB 7200rpm hard drive and more impressively, discrete graphics in the form of the ATI Mobility Radeon 5470. On paper alone, this is the first budget laptop we'd consider for any form of gaming whatsoever.

Connectivity is great too, with four USB ports, although annoyingly two of them are on the back. One also functions as a dual-purpose eSATA port, should you want faster external storage. An SD/MMC/MS card reader, VGA and HDMI ports, and 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks round out the ports, with 100Mb Ethernet, 802.11g/n and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR filling in the network duties.

Software

Running on Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, Dell's software bundle includes a dock at the top of the screen, but this is filled with mostly useless shortcuts to pre-existing Windows functions, and for the most part replicates the Windows 7 task bar. The desktop is otherwise kept bare, something that we thoroughly support.

That doesn't mean the usual crapware fiesta isn't there — Dell's partnered with McAfee to cover internet security, while the usual Microsoft Office trial is also present. Windows Live Essentials is also along for the ride, which means a Windows Live toolbar in Internet Explorer. PowerDVD DX is mostly redundant considering Windows 7 supports DVD playback in Media Player (although offers greater configurability), while Roxio is performing DVD-burning duties through Roxio Burn.

One positive is that you do get a full version of Microsoft Works 9 — however, Works has long been the poorer, frail, dying cousin of Office, and Office Home and Student would have been a better choice here.

Performance

With the discrete Mobility Radeon 5470 behind it, the 15R was always going to trounce its integrated competitors, which is essentially the entire sub-AU$1000 market. In 3DMark06 it scored 4439, easily twice that of its competitors. It doesn't make it a gaming notebook, but it certainly has a better shot at some older games, and more forgiving game engines that scale excellently like Valve's Source. The graphics didn't contribute as much to the PCMark05 score, delivering 5874, but this should make it fine for any office work or internet browsing you may care to do.We sale online DELL laptop battery

Generally, discrete graphics tend to hit the battery pretty hard, but in the 15R's case it didn't lose out too badly — with all power-saving features turned off, screen brightness and volume set to maximum, and an XviD file played back, the 15R lasted one hour, 57 minutes and 59 seconds. In the sub-AU$1000 category, battery time is usually around two to three hours, and that's with integrated graphics — Dell has done well here.

The Dell Inspiron 15R is a fantastic value proposition. While we're a little bit concerned about the plastic-feeling build quality, the amount of power crammed into the machine for the price is impressive.

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Specifications

Display

Natural resolution (max)
1366 x 768 pixels

Diagonal screen size
15.6 inch

Connectivity

Network interface
10/100 LAN, Bluetooth, 802.11g, 802.11n

eSATA ports
1

USB ports
4

VGA
Yes

HDMI
Yes

Graphics

Graphics hardware
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470

Memory

Amt of RAM
4GB

Memory card reader
Yes

Processor

Processor type
Intel Core i3

Processor speed
2.13 GHz

Drives

Primary hard drive
500 GB

Optical drive
DVD-RW

Software

Operating system
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

General

Dimensions (H x W x D)
31.8 x 376 x 262 mm

Weight
2.65 kg

Laptop type
Midweight

Sound

Embedded stereo speakers
Yes

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We specialize in substitute batteries(laptop battery, Digital Camera Battery, power tool battery) and battery packs for laptops, camcorders, digital cameras, PDAs, mobile phones, and power tools, etc. as well as battery chargers!

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