Starting UF in Fall 2015, possibly doing biomed engineering. I’m considering the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Series as a laptop workstation, that can be taken to classes, used to take notes, etc. I’d like the Dell XPS 13 but it’s too pretty of a penny.
So if anyone (or their child) here has experience with a Dell laptop, especially the above mentioned, could you share your experience with its performance? Or if you can recommend a better laptop that’d be great. I’d really appreciate it, thanks so much.
As someone who works in IT and performed maintenance/repairs on many laptops…including Dells I’d recommend steering clear of the Inspiron/Vostro line as they are targeted towards the budget consumer/small business market. As a result, Dell tends to cut a lot of corners in terms of build quality.
the flexing issue is very serious as that could cause the motherboard inside the notebook to fail much sooner due to the flexing causing broken solder/circuit connections.
I actually have a couple of older inspiron notebooks which failed because of too much flexing of the casing which ended up fatally damaging the motherboard. Although I could have replaced the boards, I had to tell the clients they were much better off buying a new machine as the failure was caused by defective build quality and design and replacing the board meant they will be back with the exact same issue before long.
I agree with Cobra, if you are going to buy a dell laptop get one of their other product lines. If you want to find a good deal, check out sites like deal buy, you can usually find good deals there. Microcenter online is pretty good, as can be tiger electronics. The cheaper dell models of laptop are pretty flimsy, and I wouldn’t recommend dragging them around like that. Make sure to get one with at least 8 gig of memory and I would recommend getting one with an SSD drive (solid state drive) as the primary drive, if not the only one, they are light years faster and more reliable then standard hard drives, especially important for a laptop.
Thanks for the insight. Could you suggest an alternative model that might meet the requirements? (minimum 8gb RAM, 500gb storage, good graphics card, i7 processor, fast, touch-sensitive)
For example, what do you think about the HP Envy 15, Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga or Asus Zenbook UX305?
I have a Dell laptop (not the one you mention) and I HATE IT.
I’ll be typing a response on CC (or email or any other site) and I look up at the screen to see that my text has magically begun to be inserted in the prior paragraph. Or I’ll move my cursor over and click at another location to begin typing something there, only to see that it has highlighted a whole paragraph and deletes it before I have a chance to stop it. Stuff like that happens ALL the time.
I’ve never had another laptop with behavior like this. Because I don’t need it to make my living, it’s simply for pleasure, I haven’t gotten rid of it. But if I needed this for work, I would have been at my wit’s end. It’s only a little over a year old.
We have had several Dells in our home. H has a 4 yo Dell laptop he uses for off-site work and has never had a problem with it in the 3 years he’s had it. I have a Dell desktop and other than one virus that was my own fault (didn’t update my anti-virus), which they fixed for me remotely, I have never had a problem. I have an HP laptop and have the same problem Nrdsb4 has with her Dell-it is not a Dell problem alone, and I’ve never heard of a Dell user experiencing this.
@nrdsb4:
You could be running into problems with the touchpad, outside the macbook air I have most of the touchpads are horrible. I use a dell laptop for work, and I disabled the touchpad from the control panel, because it constantly picked up my hand going across it and it caused issues. I would try disabling the touchpad (or changing its sensitivity) and see what happens.
@musicprnt, I wondered if the touchpad was the problem. If I disabled it, I’d have to get a mouse though, correct? I will see if I can change the sensitivity.
@nrdsb4:
Their touchpad is pretty bad, I use the touchpad on my macbook air and have no problems with it, but I found the one on my dell work laptop to be unusable, and it got in the way. You can change the sensitivity settings on it (if you don’t know how, check Dell’s website), plus try updating the drivers for it as well, but I found it was pretty bad. You might do better with a small trackball sitting on the case below the spacebar, or if you are working on a desk, use a mouse.
Two computer guys, one an independent consultant, the other an employee of a large engineering company, told me to stick to Lenovos, so that’s what we’ve done and we’ve been happy with them. The engineering company sends out their employees on many site visits, so the laptops need to be tough and reliable. They had too many problems with Dells and HPs but like the Lenovos a lot.
One laptop I would not recommend are any of ASUS laptops. They make some neat laptops at a pretty good price, their zenbook is pretty neat, but in terms of reliability and getting parts if you need service, forget it. My son got an ASUS for school, and I had gotten a service contract for it through the seller, fortunately. The computer died, the motherboard failed, and the repair place couldn’t get any response from ASUS (kind of ironic, given that ASUS started out as a major player in motherboards for pc’s and laptops). They ended up letting him get a new machine (non ASUS!) under the terms of the contract.