Dell Inspiron 15: Best Inexpensive Laptop?

Today we are going to be taking a look at the Dell Inspiron 15 3000 Series 3552 Laptop. I have been using this laptop for the past year and there is plenty to complain about in the year I've had it. But first, let's just take a look at what kind of power it has.

First off, it has a 15.6 inch screen so you do have a decent amount of screen space available. Screen resolution is 1366x768 pixels (HD) and although this laptop is not touchscreen, I somehow managed to get fingerprints on it... weird. Anyway, it has glossy coating on the sides and top of the screen which is a real fingerprint magnet but still looks good over all.

The laptop has a plastic top cover and on there is also plastic on the bottom with ventilation and a removable cover to access the inside of the rig.

The Inspiron has ports on each side. On the left side it has the charging plug, more ventilation, an HDMI plug, USB 3.0, and an SD card reader.

On the right side it includes two USB 2.0 and a 3.5mm headphone/microphone audio jack.

The keyboard is a full sized keyboard but unfortunately is not backlit. It is pretty responsive with what you click so there is no complaining about that.

Sounds pretty good so far, right? Well let's take a look on whats inside next. 

Dell's Inspiron comes with either the dual-core Intel Celeron N3050 or the quad-core Pentium N3700 CPU. Both of these processors are on the lower-end of the spectrum and the Intel Celeron is pretty slow over all but is still usable for simple stuff like home and office work. The Intel Pentium processor is smoother than the Celeron but still can't handle nearly any of the stuff that modern day processors can. With the given choice, the Intel Pentium is definitely a better choice.

The system memory size is only 4GB. This is normal for a laptop in this pricing range, so nothing really to say about this here. Dell gave some pretty good choices on storage. You can either go with 500GB HDD or 128GB SSD. So depending on what you're planning to do on the laptop, you can make the decision yourself.

Graphics processing simply relies on the Intel HD integrated graphics. This would not make this laptop ideal for gaming at all. But if you plan on doing very light gaming, you should be fine. The battery life is pretty good. The 40 WHr battery provides a life of up to 8 hours.

So over all for $250, it's pretty decent. It would be ideal for just simple day-to-day home or office work. I personally use it for a little more than that and I would like to mention that adobe photoshop actually runs pretty well on it. So if your looking for a cheap laptop that will get the job done, this is definitely a great choice. Just don't expect to do stuff like 3D rendering or video editing. But feel free to check it out through the link below.

Dell Inspiron 15 3000 3552 Laptop ($249.99)