It’s hard to find fault with this recently updated version of Dell’s Inspiron 15R laptop. It’s competitively priced, smart and well built, and provides good all-round performance and battery life. See also: Group test: what's the best budget laptop?
Available in several different colours, including pink, red, silver and a rather fetching metallic blue, the Inspiron 15R certainly doesn’t look like a budget laptop. It doesn’t feel like one either – the case is plastic, but solidly built with a large trackpad and a firm, comfortable keyboard. It’ll be a good choice if you need to type up a long report or do a bit of number-crunching in Excel.
The 15.6 inch screen is bright and clear, and has the standard 1366x768 resolution. We can’t really complain about a lack of a Full HD display at this price.
The speakers sound a bit thin, with very little bass, but that’s a minor criticism in an otherwise well-constructed laptop. It’s a little hefty at 2.3Kg, but just about portable enough to carry around in a backpack or briefcase.
There are cheaper versions of the 15R, with prices starting at £399 for a model with an i3 processor. The model reviewed here has the same chassis, screen and keyboard but is fitted with a dual-core i5 running at 1.7GHz (2.6GHz with Turboboost), a healthy 8GB of memory and a 1TB hard drive.
This combination managed a score of 2834 in the PCMark 7 suite. The 15R-5521 will take web browsing and office work in its stride, and the extra memory and storage space makes it a decent choice for more demanding tasks such as video-editing too.
It can even handle a spot of casual gaming – as long as you’re not too fussy about having all the latest graphical eye-candy. Running Stalker at 1366x768 with high graphics settings produced a speed of 23fps, and dropping that to 1280x720 and low graphics allowed it to run at 35fps.
Battery life proved a pleasant surprise. The 65Wh battery pack managed an impressive six hours of streaming video from BBC iPlayer via Wi-Fi. You should get a close to a full day out of it if you're simply running Microsoft Office (which isn't included).
Dell picks up some extra kudos for its warranty which includes ‘in-home’ repair.
Comments
John Clarkson said: I can only see the one with the review spec at over 650
Chris said: I would strongly recommend getting the version with the Radeon 2Gb graphics and also 8Gb RAM For any kind of game or intensive graphics the Intel on board graphics is useless
Ben S said: thank you I just might do that
Ben S said: On the official website there is no 8gb version only 4gb does anyone know where I can get the better one
Owen said: The 549 version has an AMD Raedon 2 Gb card instead of the integrated graphics
ememeh said: Thats not true - I got the exact same spec as in this review for 499
GeeCee said: The price is wrong Go to the dell site and the Inspiron 15R at that spec is 549
Dell said: What is the battery life - friends and I all have dying Dells at just under 3 years and a new battery is over 60 quid