Newegg DELL Inspiron 15R i5-3210M 8GB DDR3 1TB HD Intel HD4000 $479.99 shipped

[Steltek]

Link

You surely won't find an uglier laptop anywhere. However, it appears very loaded for the price (the Details tab indicates it also has Bluetooth in addition to the Intel Centrino 2x2 wireless module). Only thing I'm not sure of is what type of optical drive it has (website says DVDRW in some places and DVDROM in others).

Also includes a $15 rebate card to cover the cost of Win8 upgrade for those so inclined.

 

[bigi]

FYI,

We have lots of those at work. SOME of them have really crappy LCD - one can literally see pixels on it.

 

[AFurryReptile]

I have an Inspiron at work, and I hate it. The touchpad sucks, the screen is washed out and grainy. And the computer is horribly slow to start up or use for any kind of multitasking.

I guess this is a good deal if you don't do much with it, but as an IT professional, it really doesn't cut it for me.

 

[kmmatney]

I have an Inspiron Special Edition 17R, but I'm sure it shares a lot of parts with this. This replaced an old Inspiron 9400 which I've had since 2006 (and loved). Unfortunately, the quality has gone downhill. As some already mentioned, the touchpad really sucks. I've been using laptops since 1995, and touchpads since around 1999, and have never had any problems until this one. I don't know how you can screw it up this bad. It also drops all networking with a put the system to sleep or hibernate, and I have to reboot to get any network connection back. This problem happened after I upgraded to Windows Professional, and I can figure out a solution. I'm thinking about getting Windows 8, just to see if this can solve the problem. Very annoying.

My special edition has a decent screen, and is very fast (Core i7, 8 threads), so I'm happy with the performance, and the auto-switching between the Intel and NVidia graphics works nicely. SO main problems are touchpad and not being able to put the computer to sleep.