Buy Inspiron 15R Notebook 5520

Customer Ratings:

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.

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I've had this laptop since Christmas of last year, and I really like it, but, it can be a bit slow at times, plus it takes me about about 10 minutes to get it into a useable state after already logging on, that may be just me, but I think it has something to do with the laptop.

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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I started having touchpad issues shortly after purchasing this and should have just gotten a refund but the dell service people said they could fix it. They reset something and it didn't help the problem. When I called back they kept saying they had resolved it and kept transferring me to three people in india to tell my story again and again and they only they had the same reply again and again. They had resolved it last time yet they wanted to charge me to do the same procedure again that didn't work the first time. They kept me on the phone for 45 mintues without even addressing the touchpad issue just that I had called before on the issue and it had been "resolved" which it hadn't. So essentially they offered no help and insinuated I was a liar and ultimately they hung up on me or got disconnected and never called me back despite taking my phone number down in case we got disconnected. I will never buy a Dell again, what a horrible company. I miss my acer laptop.

DON'T BUY A DELL. THEIR CUSTOMERS SERVICE WILL SHAVE YEARS OFF IN YOUR LIFE IN TERMS OF STRESS.