Got Dell Inspiron 15R delivered few days back. Was trying to decide between entry level Sony, Lenovo, HP and Dell. My friend’s HP has too much heating issues, moreover I dont fancy HP’s steel finish. Sony and Lenovo both were giving similar configuration but Dell won with its superior price and looks. For 41k oddDell was giving i350M 2.26Ghz, 4Gig RAM, ATI Radon 5470 512Mb GPU and Win 7 Premium with Home and Student Office(E value code T540506IN8) and 15 months McAffee. For me Hard drive space is unimportant. My major need is browsing with occasional gaming and ppt, xl and doc making. I also plan to store pics. For thistype of work these specs are more than adequate and at least 3-4 years future proof. I dont intend to do any type of high end computing work.
Laptop build is fabulous, screen is very nice. Win 7 Premium comes with fancy Aero graphics and cool gadgets which looks like iphone variety. Connected the lappy to our Samsung plasma TV via HDMI cable and it works very well. Picture on the 50inch plasma is very crisp. Played my camcorder DVDs which looked better than when I play fromthe DVD player. Our TV is connect to home theatre sytstem, using wireless internet(BSNL dataone service, Belkin N router) played online music. It was just mindblowing, something unimaginable few years back. Just wish I had a longer HDMI cable though!
To see CPU and RAM load started all powerpoint, excel, word, adobe, internet explorer, chrome etc. Hardly any load on CPU(less than 5%) and RAM usage at 35-40%. All application takes about 2-5 seconds to load. Loaded my old games - Midtown Madness and Pharaoh(yes I am that old!). Both the games played like a charm at max settings. Could not load NFSIII, error was Win 7 is 64 bit OS. Will try to see if any drivers are available on the net. Planning to pay and download Halflife and Age of Empires III from net, lets see how they fare. Hibernating takes about 5-8 secondsand restarting the computer takes less than a minute. I have worked on the laptop for 4 hours at a stretch, no heating issues on the keypad surface and deck. Actually that is one more reason I didnt want to go for a high end processor, since I really like to put the laptop on my lap and work. BTW, Chrome is faster than IE.
All in all, these are my initial experiences. They have been fantastic. Hope this stays and hope this helps you.
July 18th 2010 update.
Fantastic performance.No issues so far. Could get a patch for NFS III and download Half life from Steam. Both being played at max setting. Processor runs at 40-50%. RAM at 40%. This is the max utilization of the processor and RAM. One nice touch is the touchpad disable button which is useful during gaming. For general browsing, which is what I do 90% of the time, they run at 2-6% and 24-30% respectively. Could do video chat in google talk, very nice. So far no cons.