Stylish laptop with performance to match at a good price (Dell Inspiron 1545)

Member Name: sax_man_al

Product:	Dell Inspiron 1545
Date:	01/07/09 (147 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Performance, price, screen

Disadvantages: Gloss black shows up fingerprints!

A very stylish laptop, and the performance to match, at a price that won't break your bank balance! Using the Dell outlet store I grabbed a bargain spec Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 (2.0GHz, 800MHz, 2MB), 3GB RAM, 15.6" widescreen, with an extra high capacity battery.

I was surprised by how wide the screen is, 1366 x 768 pixels, so there is not much height to the screen, I've set the windows taskbar to dissapear to give me an extra 15 pixels of space! On the other hand the gloss black screen is great. I had always been worried about reflections, but, the colour and contrast is absolutely stunning and I do a lot of photo editing so should know!

Performance is great, the only limiting factor according to the vista performance monitor is the lack of a graphics card. However, I do lots of work in photoshop cs3 and don't find it struggling at all even when creating panoramas of 500MB+

3 USB ports is a bit of a limitation, so if you have a few peripherals then you will need a USB hub.

There is no modem port so if you are one of the few people on dialup you'd need an external modem.

The black gloss finish shows up fingerprints really easily so a cloth is always needed to keep it looking good. There is no latch to hold the lid shut, although it seems to work OK as it is.

I did have a faulty screen, but the legendary dell service had an engineer out to fix it even though I didn't have on site repair because I live miles and miles from a courier.

Summary: Excellent performance, good price, wonderful screen

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