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Dell Insprion 5150 

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I've finally bought a new laptop to replace my excellent but aging Toshiba. After reviewing quite a few options the only real choice was the Dell Inspiron 5150. The price performance can't be beat - in theory at least. I was a little nervous about whether it would live up to my expectations!

This is my second Dell, the first being a Dell Dimension XPR400 - a 400MHz Pentium II from about 5 years ago. That machine was excellent and is still in service in the house. Between then and now I acquired a Toshiba laptop, a 500Mhz Pentium III that has seen over 3 years use - on permanently in that time and used to write some hefty software. It's still going strong, but the 6Gbyte hard disk really had reached the limits of what's required by an engineer.

First of all - let me define the kind of user I am. I'm a software engineer - what I really need is a powerful desktop machine - but with the added advantage that I want to be able to move it around my home-office (and the garden on a warm summers day!). That's about as portable as it gets - I have the occassional meeting at a client or potential client where I take along the machine, but that's the exception. Weight therefore isn't a huge issue - power is though. I'm not interested in the new range of 'slimmed down' centrino notebooks that seem to be an expensive waste of money - and a great money-spinner for Intel!

My basic philosophy whenever buying a computer has been to buy the best leading edge machine without hitting the bleading edge - and then keep that machine for a *long* time.

Ideally I would have bought a new Toshiba - I've just been so amazed by the performance and reliability of my existing machine why would I want to move to a different supplier? Unfortunately Toshiba seem to have changed over the last few years. For a start the processor and memory options seems to lag way behind other vendors, and the machines now seem to have a much more 'retail' air about them. Can't define it - but they just didn't appeal, and for what you get they are expensive.

So onto my choice. After a lot of dithering and review reading I settled on the Dell - an Inspiron 5150. I chose to upgrade a few options so the actual specification for the machine I ordered is as follows:

  • 3GHz Pentium 4, with hyper-threading (probably useless, but at £15 why not?)
  • 512Mbytes of 333Mhz memory - the fastest I've seen on a laptop. Dell had a 'double the memory' offer at the time so I only paid for 256M.
  • 60GByte hard drive - I have my record collection to think about!
  • 1600x1200 LCD screen. This was the thing I was most uneasy about. Could a 15" LCD screen at that resolution be usable? I haven't seen any other manufacturer offer screens at this resolution.
  • DVD+RW drive.
  • WiFi 802.11g This was an option - but not from my point of view. WiFi is now completely indispensible (I'm writing this from the sofa with a glass of wine on the table next to me!)
  • Winows XP - professional (an upgrade from the home addition)

Standard features include 2xUSB2 ports, S-Video out, VGA out, fire-wire, 10/100 Ethernet and 56K modem.

Missing features include a serial, parallel, PS/2 mouse/keyboard connector. None of these to me were important - there are excellent USB peripherals available for all of these.

This specification needs power and power means weight. This isn't you're average run-of-the mill laptop - this is an engineers grade piece or technology. The battery is huge - the power supply like a brick. If you want ultra-portable don't look here!

Onto the verdict!

I've had this machine now for about a month. The short verdict is WOW. It's lived up to every hope I had for it. The LCD being the most amazing screen I've seen. Holding it up against my 17" Triniton CRT - the visible area is about the same. Running the CRT at 1600x1200 is a little fuzzy - the LCD is crystal clear. Performance is great as well. I haven't even began to stress it yet. I keep all my CDs on the hard-drive - and each time I buy a new one it is copied, with this machine it copies and MP3 encodes an entire disk in about 5 minutes - and the rest of the machine continues to work smoothly. It's interesting looking at the performance meter when this is happening. Intels hyper-threading makes the processor look like two processors to the software - basically you have a multi-processor system. Ripping the CD send one of the 'CPU's to about 40% - the other one reacing about 5% as I do some completely different task. Probably marketing hype - but I like it :-)

Battery life is also excellent (partly due to the weight I think!) I've been sitting here for over an hour now on battery power and the meter still says full. I have used the machine on battery for over 3 hours with no problems at all.

The only downside (and it's minor) is the height of the system. It is quite deep - and when typing with the laptop on the desk I find my wrist resting right on an uncomfortable corner. Other than that I love this machine - top marks to Dell!

Price

I paid about £1200 before VAT - I couldn't find a spec like this anywhere else. I think the price might be lower still now.

Overall Rating?

In some ways I don't like to do this - it's not in my nature as an engineer to overly praise things, but right now apart from minor points, I can't find anything very wrong with this computer. For anyone that wants a desktop they can move around the house or office with the occassional trip 'offsite' - this has to be the machine. Don't buy it if you're always on the road - unless it's part of a fitness regime - but lets face it - Dell have other solutions for those people.

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Comment by petew, 3 Jan 2007 12:04

I had the same problem. First the DVD re-writer died completely. Then it started cutting out with no notice at all (overheating I think). It's out of warrenty of course. I think there are some design issues, primarily around trying to cram in a fill 3G Pentium 4 into a package with insufficient cooling. I wouldn't be surprised if heat isn't what caused the DVD to fail. Before this laptop I'd always been very happy with Dell, although I'd only had their desktop machines. This seems to be an example of insufficient testing on the part of Dell prior to launch.
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Comment by old-timer, 8 Aug 2006 23:51

I've had one of these for a couple of years and had a few problems just after the first year warrenty expired. Anyone else have problems with this? I'm thinking about a new puter now and not sure whether to go with Dell again.

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