Inspiron 1501 is ok but could be better
Written: Jun 13 '07
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Pros: Great price with more than adequate features
Cons: low battery life and a bit noisy
The Bottom Line: OK laptop for the price but think if your willing to spend a bit more you can find a better laptop
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| craftgun40's Full Review: Dell InspironTM 1501 PC Notebook |
I bought the 1501 after doing some price searching. I came across the Inspiron from an advertisement email sent from Dell and went to their site to investigate. I am not a computer geek and only know how to use a laptop, so my review is not technical, but from a ordinary users perspective.
The Dell site lets you "build" your laptop, by offering you different options other than what comes standard with the Inspiron, so the choice is yours of what you want included, however to do much changing comes with at times a hefty price to upgrade to a better component.
Wanting to keep the price at the advertised price, which was what attracted me to it to begin with, ($499.00) with free shipping, I stuck with the basic package, only upgrading to a better screen display for an additional 10 dollars, however I do now have regrets that I did not pop for the extra money to get a better battery. The battery life is very short unless you upgrade. I get less than two hours use on the battery that came standard with it, though to get a six hour battery would have jacked the price up around 189 dollars more.
The laptop itself is comfortable, nice looking (though who really cares what it looks like) and more than adequate for computer needs of an average user like me.
It is not the quietest laptop I have had, this is my third laptop and this one is noisier than the other two. The fan is a bit noisy and when it loads a cd or dvd, it makes enough noise that I have concerns that something is wrong, but that just seems to be a characteristic of this laptop as I have read where others owners say the same thing.
I had a key stick right after I got the laptop but it seems to have worked itself thru ok and seems fine now.
The speaker quality is average to good but sometimes I have to fool around with it a bit to get the sound to lower or increase, but I find by going in to the volumn control thru the accessory/entertainment icon that it responds as it should.
After loading in a few of my own software programs, I now find that the laptop will not actually shut down when I try to shut it down, it will go thru all the motions of shutting down, and windows will reach the point of shut down but then it just freezes on the screen and I have to shut down manually. Even when I close down Zone Alarm and Norton, it still will not shut down as it should. I realize that this may be a software problem on MY end and not the fault of the laptop.
I do a lot of photo editing with Photoshop CS2 and there is no problem with saving the photoshop versions of dozens of photos as I continue to work on them using the standard 80gb hard drive.
Standard was a dvd dual layer burner, which I have only used once, for I found the newer Roxio they included with the Inspiron was not very user friendly for me, so I loaded in my old Roxio drag to disk program and used that to burn the dvd.
A very nice feature of the 1501 is that it has four USB ports, a ethernet port, a modem port and a 3 in 1 memory card reader which can be worth a lot in itself if you use different cameras.
Dell offered you the choise of Vista or XP professional or XP home. I know most people would have chosen Vista but I was unsure if all my photo editing programs would run on Vista and I have always been completely happy with XP so I stayed with the old tried and true and had them load XP into my laptop.
All in all I am satisfied with the Inspiron because of the price I paid for it and the features it offered for that price, however while I was doing research on the 1501 before I purchased it, I saw that a number of reviews mentioned that for only a little bit more money you could own the Inspiron 1505 which was claimed to be a much better laptop. My purchase choise was pretty much based on price and what you got standard for that price.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 459.0
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Don''t Know
Processor speed: 501-600
Screen Size: Greater than 15 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
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Epinions.com ID:
craftgun40
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Location: Michigan
Reviews written: 153
Trusted by: 124 members
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