The Dell Inspiron 1501 is a laptop computer that was released in 2007. It was quite famous for its use of the AMD Turion processor instead of a processor by Intel. I personally believe that this laptop is the worse I have ever used and in this review I will be explaining why.

The laptop itself:

The standard colour is silver with a white plastic trim on the edges. The plastic shell is rather flimsy and can be flexed with a thumb! The screen is 15.4" which is pretty standard for a laptop of this price range. The mouse pad has areas for scrolling on the right hand side and bottom edge. The buttons on the mouse pad are a unique design that regularly stick and in my case the left button stuck after 2 days of use and now after 4 years it still hasn't popped out, leaving it useless. The keyboard is the normal dell design in all black. There are no other buttons apart from the Power button. Next to the power button are some green LEDs that show the status of wifi, cpu and disk drive.

Software:

The laptop came preloaded with the infamous Windows Vista and even after 3 re-installs and several service packs there has been no improvements on compatibility or speed. Vista often shows the BSOD for no apparent reason such as plugging in a (new so virus free) usb flash drive.
Dell also loaded the laptop with their "useful" support tools and other spyware infested programs from their "selected partners".

Hardware:

The hardware on this machine was mid-range when released with a 1.9ghz AMD Turion dual-core processor, 2gb RAM and 160gb HDD. There is NO dedicated graphics card but instead a "soft" card that is the ATi Radeon Xpress 1150 (which has now been discontinued). The battery is of a very poor quality and is no longer recognized by the PC (error message after POST). The mouse pad has a very grainy texture making uncomfortable to use for longer periods of time. A Dell Wifi Minicard provides WiFi support however only for the older standards of 802.11b/g. The DVD drive is a 16x DVDRW combi that has a tendency of producing "bad burns".;

Performance:

Performance is appalling even during the most basic tasks of Word Processing and playing Flash games. Often words display several seconds after you typed them and flash games run at less than 10fps. The temperature of the laptop soars when opening programs such as Internet Explorer. The DVD drive is quite slow and gets extremely loud, especially for Install disks.

Battery Life:

The battery quality and battery life on this laptop is appalling. The battery on lasted around 1 hour on power saving when it was new and now after ~3 years the battery doesnt work at all meaning it has to be plugged in at all times! So it cannot be used as a laptop now and is just sat collecting dust.