I purchased this laptop during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. I paid $498.94 after tax.I have the model with 8GB of DDR3 memory and the Intel Core i5-3210 @ 2.5Ghz CPU.
Everything on this laptop works great with the exception of the slow hard drive @ 5400rpm. It's a great amount of space, but I want my operating system and applications to load faster, so I'll be throwing in a Solid State Drive in this thing.
Through some research I've found that this particular model typically does not have support for mSATA devices, but there is a part # from Dell that you can order for around $15 that will allow you to install a SSD without removing the primary hard disk or the CDROM drive. The part number is N7JHH (Daughterboard w/ mSATA port) from Dell. Once you've installed this part, you can install an mSATA drive to the board to host your operating system, and leave the 1TB 5400RPM drive to host your data.
If you don't like the idea of buying the daughterboard from DELL and installing it, you can also buy a "2nd HDD Caddy" or a new "Disk Bay Adapter" for the laptop, which just replaces the CD-ROM drive with a SATA drive (its okay, you can use an external cdrom drive or just use USB drives for everything). A good place to look is newmodeus.com
I love how all of the USB ports are now 3.0 and it has the 3rd Gen Intel Chip w/ graphics.
I dislike how the power port and RJ45 now on the sides instead of the back like in the older models, but its a minor flaw.
Pros:
Good for students
relatively small
not windows 8 ;)
Cons:
a bit slow
pretty bad display
low battery life
loaded with useless dell media drivers that slow it down further
I'd recommend it if your on a budget, other than that... no.
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