I've had the Dell Inspiron 17R (500 gig hard drive; 4 gigs RAM; i5-2410m processor) for about a month. I upgraded it to 6 gigs of RAM.The Inspiron is a pretty good value. You get a lot of machine for the money. The i5-2410m processor is fast. Combined with the large amount of RAM, it'll handle with ease any normal, everyday task, such as watching movies, browsing, word processing, home video editing, and so on. I can't speak to whether it'd be suitable for gaming, because I don't use it for that. However, it is quite a powerful laptop for routine computer stuff.
I have seen the screen criticized elsewhere, for not being super-high resolution, but I disagree. The 17.3" screen is one of the high points of this laptop. It is bright, sharp, and easy to read. I've always been a fan of "desktop replacement" laptops, and have several over the years, always with a 17" screen. I think this is one of the better screens out there. It's 1600x900, which is not 1920x1080, but it's still very sharp, and the Inspiron 17R is half the price of a 1920x1080 laptop.
It comes with a nice mix of ports. Two USB 3.0, a USB 2.0, and an extremely useful eSATAe. The USB3.0 ports are not providing the kind of performance I was hoping for. I think that either the laptop or my external drives are not configured properly to take advantage of USB3.0. I'm getting USB3.0 speeds that are little better than USB2.0. On the other hand, the eSATAe port is blazin' fast. I plan just to use the eSATAe port and not bother with the 3.0 ports.
My main complaint with this laptop is the mouse pad. There are some laptops out there that have a mouse which jumps around too much. This is one of them. Many other laptops do not have this problem anymore; it was a design problem that was fixed over the years. So, what does this problem entail? When you're typing, the cursor will occasionally jump elsewhere on the screen, and if you're not careful, you can end up deleting important text. And, as another reviewer noted, there's the occasional related problem of the mouse-pointer sort of pinning itself to the right side of the screen; when this happens, nothing you do on the mousepad will unstick it, and you just have to fuss with it and, ultimately, wait for it to decide to start working again. Experimenting with the mouse pad controls (sensitivity and speed, in Control Panel) helps a little, but not a lot. Fundamentally, it is just a bad mouse pad, something that should have been addressed by Dell and put to rest a long, long time ago. The cursor-jumpiness around the screen is just unacceptable on a modern laptop. The keyboard itself is mediocre; it has nice chicklet-style keys that are easy to type on, but they occasionally miss a letter when they shouldn't. I spilled just a couple of drops of Diet Coke on one key, and now that key and six surrounding keys have permanent pop-and-crackle noises when I touch them. Many (in fact, "most" or "all") other laptop keyboards are more mishap-tolerant than the one in the 17R. I want to love this laptop, but I have to say that laptops from other brands such as Toshiba have much better keyboards and mouse pads.
The battery life is poor. It is the shortest battery life I have ever experienced on a laptop. You can get about 90 minutes if you are doing light browsing. Any sort of heavy usage, like movie-watching, will put you down in the 60 to 75 minute range. I really don't get that. I've had other 17" monitor laptops that ran for 2.5 to 3.5 hours between charges. It doesn't bother me much, because I use it at home, where it's plugged in. If I was in more of a road-warrior mode, I would've already returned it. This laptop basically needs to be plugged in when you're using it. It is also very heavy substantially heavier than my last couple of 17" laptops. It really is not designed for road use, either in battery usage or weight; it's truly an old-school desktop replacement laptop.
In summary: for the price, you get a lot of laptop with Dell. The Inspiron 17R has a beautiful screen, a very fast processor, and ample storage and RAM for normal business or personal use. I don't think for the $600 to $700 (depending on configuration) you can get much more laptop elsewhere. However, the mouse, and specifically the jumpiness of the mouse, truly sucks. The keyboard is very low-end -so low-end it's hard to believe Dell thought this was an acceptable component to put on a modern, $600 machine. All in all, I give this laptop 3 stars. I would like to see Dell really drill down on why their mousepads and keyboards are not up to the competition, and replace them with better parts. I have a feeling this one will last about a year or two, and then I will probably replace it with a different brand.
Buy Dell Inspiron i17R-1713 17.3-Inch Laptop (Diamond Black) Now
0 comments:
Post a Comment