Dell Inspiron 5321

Recently a friend of mine finally decided to buy a new laptop after his 6 year old P4 model was not working out for him and asked my advice on what to buy. There is quite a few options open to people out there and some people might not recommend Dell for whatever reason. The handy thing with this person is I already knew what he was looking for in a new laptop and getting the thing to run faster and better would be done by myself.
Why Dell?
I have used dell over the many years of working, I bought my i7 desktop from dell and my 23″ monitor and my work laptop is in fact a Dell. I agree you loose some of the customised ability you get with building your own but when it comes to Laptop’s, you might as well go with a brand name right?
The Deals of the day
We checked the website and they had a range of laptops – start from a Celeron 900 (2.2Ghz) at £329 all the way up to a Dell Studio 15 running a core i3-530 @ £549. Basically there was something for everyone and they had various deals with each package. I ignore anything with the word Celeron on there (as should you) and the lowest priced ‘half decent’ system was in fact £369.
The System of choice
Intel® Pentium® Processor T4500 (2.30 GHz, 800 MHz, 1MB)
15.6″ High Definition (1366×768) WLED Display with TrueLife
Mobile Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 4500MHD
3072MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM [1x2048, 1x1024]
320GB (5,400rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive
DVD +/- RW Drive (read/write CD & DVD)
Windows 7 Premium edition
These are the main points we need to look at really, the laptop he was going from was a P4 model with 1 GIG ram and 80GIG drive I think, so this system with a Core 2 Duo, 3 GIG ram, Windows 7 Premium editon is way more then enough for this person.
Normal user
I know for a fact this person does not game, it does not matter that it has Intel 4500 graphics card in there, it will play HD movies fine. 3Gig Ram is also just right, he will have no concept of 64Bit Operating system and virtual machines. The last one which I always look at is the resolution of the screen, for me 1366×768 would not cut it but it is a jump compared to his last one, so he is happy with that spec.
Look and Feel
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It comes with what is classed as 3D Black or in other words, a print all over the laptop. I am not sure if this makes it look tacky or stylish, depends on the person I guess.
The keyboard is soft to the touch, I am not a fan of this type of keyboard and prefer the logitech style myself, also the Enter Key has a key next to this and I am not a fan of that either (You keep hitting page down instead of enter all the time). The trackpad is off to the left as you can see, I never had any issues with this myself but I did eventually plug in a mouse while setting it up.
There is no ports at all on the back, they managed to squeeze the lot on the left hand side as you can see. Three USB Ports, One VGA port and a RJ45 is all you have. It includes B/G/N Wireless of course (as do most laptops now) and a dell styled power brick.
Software as standard
It comes with Windows 7 Home Premium which will suit most people to be honest, I never took much notice if it was 32bit or 64bit. I spotted office but then seen it was a 30 day demo with the option to buy on-line. McAfee Security Centre was installed as the AntiVirus / Firewall of choice (15 months Licence), which kept asking me if I wanted to allow program ‘whatever’ through. We also had Computrace LoJack for Laptops, 1yr license – this is to allow you to get the laptop back should it get stolen.
The Webcam
I am a fan of webcams and wondered what was installed into this – we see this is a 0.3MP webcam probably made by Creative and I tested it out. As expect the quality was pretty bad in low light (aka – my room light), this would maybe suit the occasional skype with your family but maybe get a better one later on if youo do more (such as Live Streaming).
Removing the junk
I removed just about all the included software including the McAfee Security centre – even though this has a 15 Month subscription it asked me a lot of questions to register and a couple of points to note – in 15 months it will just end and the constant pop-ups are not good in my eyes. Once all the software was removed, I installed some workable software that did the same job but for Free and at least it won’t run out on him
Conclusion
For the price of £369 – this is not a bad built laptop, you can probably by the similar specification from Acer, HP or whatever. The good thing was he ordered it and by the next day, it had arrived ready to go.

Tagged as: 15.6, cheap, core2duo, dell, inspiron, laptop

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