The Inspiron 15 3542 is an inexpensive allrounder-notebook. Thanks to a powerful Core i5 processor and dedicated GeForce graphics card, even gaming is not out of the question. The battery life is very decent as well.
The Inspiron sports a simple black plastic chassis. Most of material is matte, although the left and right sides of the base unit and the edges of the display lid are glossy instead. The back of the display is textured.
The Inspiron is equipped with the common selection of physical ports. Both the Ideapad Z50-75 and the Aspire E1-572G are similar in that respect, although both feature VGA out as well and Gigabit Ethernet. The Inspiron has Fast Ethernet only.
The Inspiron comes with a maintenance cover which is held by a single screw. Removing the cover reveals the hard drive, the WLAN module, and the system RAM. The notebook only has a single RAM slot, which of course is occupied. Swapping the hard drive out for a different one should be fairly simple.
The multitouch-capable clickpad measures 10.5 cm x 6 cm. In our opinion, there’s enough room for an even larger touchpad. The surface is slightly rough to the touch and allows the fingers to glide effortlessly.
The Inspiron relies on a Haswell-generation dual-core Core i5-4210U CPU. The processor has a clock speed of 1.7 GHZ and can overclock to 2.4 GHz (both cores) or 2.7 GHz (one core) using Turbo Boost. The CPU is exactly 100 MHz faster than the Core i5-4200U, which is not really noticeable during daily use. The Core i5-4210U is a ULV CPU with a very modest power consumption. The CPU tackled the Cinebench benchmark tests at the maximum 2.4 GHz regardless if the notebook was plugged in or running on battery. During the single-threaded tests, on or the other core jumps to 2.7 GHz at regular intervals. The Turbo levels are fully utilized at all times.