The Budget-Friendly Dell Inspiron 1545 Notebook

The biggest highlight of the Dell Inspiron 1545 Notebook, is its price. At just about £430, this is a good bargain. It packs in quite a decent set of specs for the price.

Aesthetics – One of the most catchy aspects about this notebook is the variety of colours it is available in. There’s pink, 2 different shades of blue, red, white and black. The lid has the Dell logo emblazoned in the centre. Apart from the keyboard and the touchpad, the entire notebook, from lid and screen to palm-rest and bezel, is highly glossy. This definitely adds to its beauty. But apart from attention, it attracts plenty of finger-prints too. Nonetheless, this notebook scores high in terms of aesthetics.

Build – The Dell Inspiron 15 has a 15.6” glossy display with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. It presents a widescreen aspect ratio of 16:9. The keyboard has well spaced keys and is comfortable to work on. The touchpad is well placed too. It is responsive as well. Below this, are the 2 mouse buttons. The speaker-net covers the real estate above the keyboard. The power button is located in between the speaker and the keyboard.

Along the right-hand side of the notebook, you’ll find a USB 2.0 port, a 34mm ExpressCard slot and a DVD rewritable drive. On the left-hand side are 2 more USB 2.0 ports, a Kensington lock, a power connector, a VGA port and the Ethernet jack. On the front side, are the audio jacks (headphone and microphone) and a 7-in-1 card reader [Secure Digital (SD), Hi-Density Secure Digital (SDHD), Hi-Capacity Secure Digital (SDHC), xD Picture Card (xD), Memory Stick (MS), Memory Stick PRO (MS PRO) and Multi Media Card (MMC)]

Internal Dell Inspiron 1545 specs – The Intel Core 2 Duo 2 GHz processor comes loaded within. The notebook ships with either 2GB or 3GB of RAM. This can be upgraded to 4GB for faster performance. However, the existing RAM and processor combo is quite capable of handling your day-to-day computations. The 250GB hard drive is quite spacious to store all your files. However, this can as well be upgraded to 320GB or 500GB, for more storage space. For the OS, you get the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium. The Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics processor is employed in this laptop.

Networking – Connecting to the internet can be done using wired Ethernet or WiFi. However, only the WiFi 802.11(b/g) standards are supported. The faster 802.11 Draft-N standard is not offered. Bluetooth is also not supported out-of-the-box. Also, while the basic edition does not include a web-cam, there are certain editions which come with a 1.3MP web-camera. Here again the models with camera cost a little more.

Usage and Performance – The Dell Inspiron 1545 is more a family laptop, well suited for entertainment. It can handle your daily computations, internet surfing, emailing, socialising, online shopping, bill payments and of-course multimedia. Plus, with the Intel High Definition audio that has been integrated within, this Dell notebook makes for good family entertainment. You can even opt for a Blu-ray player if you don’t minding shedding some extra £s. The Intel GMA 4500 GPU does not match up with the powerful NVIDIA or ATI processors. However you can play less demanding (not-so-speed-intensive) games on this notebook.

Battery life on the Dell Inspiron 15 is not impressive. For regular surfing, you can expect about 1.5 hours from the 4-cell battery packed inside. For multimedia, it is much lower. Therefore, this notebook should do good when staying near the mains.

Verdict – A decent spec’d family laptop, which can meet your daily computational and entertainment needs. Very budget-friendly. However, the battery life is not very good.