J.D. Hodges

NOTE: This is a first draft / outline. The review will be updated with more info and photos…

• Startup time and hard drive
  • Slow startup with conventional hard drive and a bit of bloatware (trend micro, Dell utilities)
  • Hard drive space from factory: 262GB free of 283GB
• Cooling and fan noise
  • It has one dinky little cooling fan. Small fan = has to spin fast. So when the fan kicks in you really notice it.
  • Thankfully, the fan is not on all the time. The laptop also stays cool on your lap which is a nice change from a lot of Dell laptops like the M4400 (and other makes/models, like the Apple MacBook Air).
• Trackpad: good overall. Responsive and not prone to errors. Two finger scrolling supported but not nearly as good as on recent MacBooks.
• Screen: surprisingly good.
• Pros:
  • +Matte is awesome.
  • +Plenty of brightness.
  • +Viewing angles are better than average.
• Cons:
  • -Darks are not super dark.
  • -Not the most vibrant display ever
• Keyboard:
  • +Keyboard backlight is EXCELLENT
  • +Keys are easy to type on and I did not find myself mistyping
  • -Some keys are LOUD (like the backspace key and the UP arrow key) [may have received a slightly bad keyboard???]

Overall rating: 4/5 stars [starreview tpl=16]