Dell Inspiron i1545-4374PBU – Smart Basic Laptop

Pros

The Dell Inspiron i1545-4374PBU offers impressive performance and feature set for its price and the system has a simple clear cut design.

Cons

The Dell Inspiron i1545-4374PBU’s port assortment is really limited and the build for the system is lustrous glossy plastic build.

Introduction

Simplicity is not unappealing always. This is what one can say about Dell Inspiron i1545-4374PBU. The Dell Inspiron i1545-4374PBU might not be a flashy looking high-end laptop but this Dell laptop has a fine blend of components. Though, the ports here are really limited, but fulfills ones requirement.

Powered by Intel dual-core CPU, with 320 GB of hard drive and 4GB of memory the Dell Inspiron i1545-4374PBU offers performance decent enough to entice any basic office or home centered buyer in the market. The Dell Inspiron i1545-4374PBU clearly is not a flashy machine with high-end components, but the system works well and looks good while working.

Design

The complete chassis of Dell Inspiron i1545-4374PBU is of plastic and that remains the same for all the 15 Inspiron models, and gives them all a rather cheap feel. Though, as the systems actually are cheap, this doesn’t hurts more. The lid of Dell Inspiron i1545-4374PBU along with the keyboard surrounding and the black display bezel all are made up of lustrous fingerprint-collecting plastic, while the base of the system is a lusterless plastic. The use of plastic also  acts in favor of the system by keeping it lightweight, so as to make it easy for you to carry the system anywhere with you, without getting a back-breaking experience.

Positioned above the keyboard is a silver power button, and that’s it, there are no other media controls, although Dell has marked the function key pretty clearly, so that you don’t have any problem in executing functions like adjusting volume and screen brightness. The keys here are a little more conventional tapered type, with decent response and spacing, which makes typing here a pleasant maneuver. Located underneath the keyboard is a touch pad and decently sized a touch pad well-sized associated buttons.

The screen for Dell Inspiron i1545-4374PBU is a 15.6 inch lustrous wide-screen LCD with native resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, which is pretty normal for the laptops belonging to this price bracket. The display is sufficient for most of the conventional applications and displays easy-to-read icons and texts. The LCD here gets convincingly bright, but does suffer a bit in bright sunlight.

Positioned above Inspiron i1545-4374PBU’s display screen is a practical mic and Webcam which delivered pretty decent performance in our voice and video test. One another good thing here was the sound of speakers, they not only were they sufficiently loud, but at the same time did sounded good.

System Configuration

Price: $549.99
Manufacturer: Dell, Inc.
Part Number: i1545-4374PBU
Notebook type: Thin-and-light (4-6 lbs.)
Operating System Provided: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Edition

Processor: 2.1GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core T4300
System weight: 5.7 lbs
Dimensions (W x D x H): 14.7 x 9.6 x 1.5 in
RAM: 4GB, 800MHz DDR2

Display Type: 15.6 in TFT active matrix
Graphics Processor / Vendor: Intel GMA 4500MHD Dynamic Video Memory Technology 5.0

Screen size: 15.6 inches
Hard Drive: 320GB 5,400rpm
Hard drive type: Portable
Graphics: Intel GMA 4500MHD (integrated)
Supported flash memory cards: Memory Stick, SDIO, SD Memory Card, MultiMediaCard, Memory Stick Pro and xD-Picture Card
Software Provided: Microsoft Works
Video: VGA-out
Audio: Stereo speakers and headphone/microphone jacks
Features: Camera and 802.11b/g Wireless LAN
Optical drive: DVD burner
Wireless capabilities: IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g
Built-in Devices: Stereo speakers and Wireless LAN antenna
Input device type: Keyboard and Touchpad
Cables Included: Power cable
Battery: 6-cell Lithium ion

Performance

In terms of performance the Dell i1545-4374PBU did far better than what we expected from it. the system performed exceedingly well in our test in which we streamed music and high-resolution video on it and at the same time did also worked on spreadsheets, Web surfed, ran IM and e-mail clients, and edited photos. But that’s not it for the system and as we mentioned earlier in the rearview that it is pretty decent system for basic home or office usage, so you can do a bit more of your basic home or office tasks.

The battery of i1545-4374PBU ran for about 3 hours and 14 minutes in our demanding video playback battery draining test with its built-in six-cell battery. This again is pretty impressive, especially considering the fact that our tests are pretty demanding so you easily can expect a lot longer battery life for your normal office or home tasks like Web surfing etc.

Support

The Dell i1545-4374PBU is backed by, one year standard parts-and-labor warranty from Dell. There also is a wide range of tools available with the system which you can use for getting technical support, such as a Flash-based question widget, 24*7 toll-free telephonic support and online chat. You also can get extended warranty through retail stores, but as they are expensive generally we don’t recommend them to our consumers.

Word from the Experts

The Dell Inspiron i1545-4374PBU is a smart option for the people looking for basic laptop with solid price-to-performance ratio.