15.6″ Dell Inspiron i5547-7450sLV via Amazon
Dell Inspiron i5547-7450sLV Signature Edition is a nice and trendy looking mid level 15.6 inch laptop that seems to offer pretty good value with its modern design in silver and black colour, speed and performance of the Haswell Intel i5 processor, large memory and storage, fast 802.11ac WiFi, backlit keyboard and up to 6.5 hours battery life and it is good for school work, business and home use- moderately demanding apps and light to moderate gaming.
Dell Inspiron 5000 Series laptop has the quarter 2 2014 release 4th generation ultra low voltage dual core i5-4210U (3MB cache) at 1.70 GHz speed with turbo boost that moves the speed up to 2.70 GHz dynamically as required by tasks and hyper threading for handling 4 threads in parallel and better using the CPU, 8GB of memory at 1600MHz with 4GB chips on two memory slots, 1TB Serial ATA hard drive at 5400rpm spindle speed (if you prefer speed over size just replace it with an SSD) and Windows 8.1 64-bit operating system that will be Windows 10 soon if you’re not an admirer of the Win 8 OS.
Glossy 15.6 inch non-touch LED-backlit with Truelife HD display with 1366×768 pixel resolution and Intel HD Graphics 4400 with shared graphics memory with the main processor, offers acceptable video and image quality for most people although not as good as FHD with a higher class graphics card. HD 4400 delivers performance between Intel HD 4000 and 5000 and more or less equal to Radeon HD 7550M so you can play games like World of Warcraft and Minecraft smoothly at high settings but current titles at lower settings and frame rates per second. Audio Waves MaxxAudio and stereo speakers deliver adequate sound- not super impressive but good and you’ll see a 720p webcam with microphone on top of the screen and it is a little better than the regular VGA webcam.
Black and silver Dell Inspiron i5547-7450sLV is made of solid plastic but the top section looks like stainless steel and has a robust feel, has the measurements of 14.98 x 10.20 x 0.86 inches and weight of 4.9 pounds and 3-cell lithium-ion battery offers up to 6.5 hours in theory. Keyboard is backlit with 1.1mm keyboard travel for nice typing experience, has large touchpad of 105 x 80 mm to use on Windows 8 apps. It doesn’t come with a DVD drive but a decent range of connectivity such as the 802.11ac Miracast enabled fast wireless, Bluetooth 4.0, basic Ethernet LAN (10/100) with RJ-45, 5-in-1 Media Card Reader (SD, SD3.0, SDHC, MS and MS Pro), an HDMI output for external monitor or HDTV, 2 x USB 3.0 ports, 1 x USB 2.0 port, Headphone output/Microphone input combo and Security lock slot.
Conclusion: Dell Inspiron 15 i5547-7450sLV is a 5000 Series Signature edition PC laptop, which means you won’t find any of the trial and bloatware that could be burden on the system, performs well overall with a Passmark benchmark score of 3422 (as of 11 April) that suggests it is a high end processor but not as powerful as some of the i5 and i7 processors on the market and that is because of the way they designed it as a ULV- less power consuming CPU but having said that you will not have any problems with your regular and more demanding tasks- it is capable enough for photo editing, programming and light to medium gaming.
Sound quality is not amazing but that should not be a problem if you use headsets, screen is not FHD with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution and IPS panel but a regular HD screen so graphics is not the strength of this laptop and it has an integrated graphics card and you need a proper mid-range and above dedicated GPU for demanding game titles. We like the very large 1TB hard drive even though it is at 5400rpm and certainly not as fast as an SSD but serves the purpose at this cost point and the 8GB memory is great as it enables heavy multitasking. Optical drive is not present on this PC but external drives don’t cost much if you will be working with DVDs or CDs. It is a portable- slim, lightweight and compact PC with less than average weight and thickness as well as longer battery life at up to 6.5 hours advertised (we’re assuming that would be more like 4-5 hours in average internet browsing or video streaming as it is a 3-cell battery). In short it is a good value PC that offers good performance levels and a decent set of features and only small flaws for its price level.
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