Dell recently refreshed its Inspiron line, but it kept its familiar hierarchy in place, so it’s easy to know where Dell laptops stand relative to one another. Inspirons are still segmented into 3000, 5000, and 7000 series, according to how much power and feature juice you want, and what you’re willing to pay.
Down at the entry level, we have the 3000 series, which are ( in general) basic PCs designed for work or school, at a price most shoppers can afford. The laptop we’re examining here today is a 15-inch Inspiron 3000-series configuration that was selling for $479 at this writing and packs a bunch of real laptop parts, as opposed to netbook-grade ones. ( It’s part of Dell’s Model 3558 subfamily of this laptop.)
This $479 configuration bridges budget and mainstream laptops, as far as full-size true laptops go, with more than a morsel of storage and a big screen. The model we tested was designed to be a budget-minded desktop-replacement configuration with a full-size keyboard, 1TB of storage, a touch-screen display panel, and more. Dell offers a few models up- and down-range of it in the Model 3558 line that balance things out in other ways.
That’s the good news: that the price is reasonable, and that the component mix is a decent one for the money. The counterpoint is that every low price nonetheless has thetrue price it exacts, of course. When you buy a budget laptop, you’re buying a PC that required compromises somewhere along the line.
Some budget laptops are more compromised than others, of course, and whether or not those compromises evolve into a deal breaker is really up to your own personal preferences. But we can say that, by and large, this Dell machine, as we tested it, has a generous loadout of hardware for the money and seems to be, um, lessneutered than other systems we’ve seen at this price point. Let’s take a closer look.