Dell Inspiron 15-3531: Any Good?

[larrytucaz]

I am inquiring about a Dell Inspiron 15-3531. Someone has one for sale locally for $200, they've only owned it a week. Apparently, though, it goes for $250 (plus shipping?) brand-new. It's apparently a budget-priced type of laptop.

I am normally a desktop user, I know how to work on them to a limited degree, and thus tend to prefer them. To that end I had been considering a Dell Optiplex 380, which has a dual-core 2.53G (or 2.G, forget which) chip and 4G of RAM. Someone had one for $150, it had Windows 7 Home Premium. However, I saw the Inspiron 15-3531 for $200 which is newer and has Windows 8 (I do OK with Windows 8 installing 3rd party start button programs). Again, I normally prefer desktops with them being easier to work on and upgrade etc, but a newer one with Windows 8 for $200 would perhaps be better?

All of these are meant as backups or second-units, my main one is a Dell Inspiron 660s with Windows 8 I purchased brand-new a year ago, it's currently in repairs (the power supply failed on it and it's still under warranty--I can normally easily change power supplies, but that one is hard to remove and very "proprietary" in its shape etc).

My computer usage isn't very demanding, the main demanding programs would be Adobe Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS2. I also sometimes play 720p video clips in the .mp4 format.

Thoughts?

Moved from General Hardware

mfenn
General Hardware Moderator

 

[Ken g6]

Wow, a Bay Trail dual-core. Yeah, you're probably not going to get very far with Photoshop or Lightroom on such a machine. 720p MP4 and the usual office stuff will probably work.

Edit: Here's an Ars Technica review of a $200 laptop with a similar processor.

That Dell Optiplex might actually be faster. It's probably a Core 2 Duo (mostly guessing here), but that appears to be somewhat better than a dual-core Bay Trail. (Quad core Bay Trail is closer.) And it's a desktop, so less thermal limitations.

You can't expect much for $200. Then again, tack on about another $100 and you can get a refurb Sandy Bridge laptop, for instance. This is my personal backup system, and it's roughly equivalent to a Core 2 Quad.

 

[gmaster456]

For Office, Basic browsing etc. it should work fine. Ordered one for one of our volunteer office workers, I rarely ever deploy low end hardware but I wanted to see how well it work work for typical office tasks and so far it's doing fine and no one has complained.

I wouldn't try video editing or photoshop but for an average home user I'd say it is adequate.

 

[larrytucaz]

My tendency would be to use the laptop OCCASIONALLY. On any given day, I'd only use Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and/or Apache OpenOffice, maybe playing the occasional 720p mp4 video. I currently use an ancient Dell Inspiron 8600 with 1.7G single-core and Windows XP for that. Trips would be where I'd need an upgrade. They only occur once a year, but when they do, I would like to use Lightroom 4 and Photoshp CS2, both of which are zipping fine on the 2 computers I have as "home" in my (just updated) signature, so I can sort of check out the photos I've taken without waiting to get home. The photos are in RAW format. (The RAW files are typically 17 megabytes, and I export to TIFF which are about 61 megabytes, I then process those as JPEGs which will be about 10 megabytes.)

That person is now willing to do $170 on the Dell 15-3531. It's tempting. I'm cheap--that Acer I have as "home" in my signature? I got it at a garage sale about a month ago. For $15, I got the machine itself, the 22" Acer P221w LCD, 2 garden hoses, an electric chainsaw, an oscillating fan with electronic controls vs mechanical knobs, and a "grabbie thinge" for picking things up off the ground without stooping over. It only had 1G of RAM but I got a 2G stick and it's zipping along great now. (I'll probably get a 2nd 2G stick and make it 4G while I'm at it.) I even got an un-opened, sealed, Windows 7 Home Premium upgraded DVD for $1 at a different garage sale, and that's what I used to wipe the Acer out and start over clean.