Laptop Dell Inspiron 1545 15.6-Inch Jet Black Deals & Reviews

Andrea Polk (Southern Oregon): I've owned several laptops and would be considered an intermediate to advanced computer user. I've built my own desktops, tweaked a few laptops and owned various brands of laptops including HP, Fujitsu, Sony and Dell (Inspiron, Latitude and XPS series).
I purchased this laptop directly from Dell based upon Consumer Report's November 2009 article recommendations where the Dell Inspiron 1545 was rated a 'Best Buy' for every day computing. I purchased it for my husband who will use it primarily for watching an occasional movie from Netflix streaming wirelessly on our home network, emailing to share jokes and videos with his friends, and browsing the Internet.

Charles S. Glass "salty" (oregon coast): I bought mine from Dell with a little better price but I buy a lot from Amazon and find the reviews helpful. I have a Dell XPS which is a high end Dell and running my benchmarks it is really preforms quite well considering the cost. Like one lady said the sound is better than the xps, maybe the best I have heard on a laptop. The screen is about a 1/2 inch shorter from top to bottom but about 1/2 inch wider. I thought I would be to skinny like the new 16:9 but its fine. The screen is excellent in sharpness and color very good. The intel graphics card is ample for video and is ok for older games. I am not a gamer high end graphics are not a issue.It does have 32mb of its own ram and the rest is shared. Dell has finally installed a app to back up the system for restore like other oems. The roxio is pretty much worthless and you need something else for the normal burning that windows 7 cant do.

C. F. Hill "CFH" (South-Central, PA USA): This is a very simple laptop to set up and use. The box only contains the PC (with battery already installed), the power supply, and a packet of software CDs (which I did not use) with minimal documentation. The instructions recommended charging the laptop for 12 hours before using the battery, which was fine as I just left it plugged in while configuring the machine. The initial setup took about 20 minutes, and was very straight forward as it found and connected right away to my WEP protected home WiFi network. The Windows 7 configuration was straight forward and no errors were encountered. Dell also recommends updating the BIOS right away and the instructions are included in the documentation. It was a very easy process and only took another 20 minutes or so to complete.

Phoebus Franca "thebuffer" (San Francisco Bay Area, CA USA): I purchased this system about 9 months ago and for about 4 months, it received little to no use. However, as my IBM started acting up more and I started teaching online, I switched to the Dell as my primary system about 6 weeks ago. Yesterday, it started powering down randomly throughout the day. Since I teach online, I'm online most of the day. Tonight, it basically wouldn't even complete the boot sequence before shutting down again. I'm VERY VERY unhappy. No -- I didn't pay a lot for the system (less than four hundred bucks) but I expect it to last longer than 2 months of daily use. Well never buy a Dell again.