Dell Inspiron Laptops – any good these days?

We’re in need of a new laptop as our current one is pretty much dead and my wife goes back to work in the new year and does a lot of work at home in the evenings (primary school teacher) so a new laptop is on the cards but we need to keep the costs down as much as possible as we have 2 small kids too.

We have mobiles and an iPad so the laptop only really gets used for Word, Excel and Photoshop Elements these days so I’m thinking spec along the lines of Intel i3, 4gb ram and 500gb HDD, 15.6″ screen all of that as a minimum – anything more would be great.

Looking around the Dell Inspiron 15 3000 series has that at £299: Dell Insiron 15 3000

Alternatives at this price include some refurbished ones (still with 12 months warranty like the Dell) like this with an i5 processor: HP Pavilion 15 N013SA

or this with an i3 but 8gb ram and 1tb HDD: HP Pavilion 15 CI3

or this is a 17″ screen and the same spec (i3, 500gb, 4gb ram): Dell Inspiron 17

I guess I have two questions about laptops at this price point:
Are the Dell ones any good?
If you were to increase our desired spec would you have a higher spec processor or more RAM/HD or larger screen?

Was considering a new laptop, stuck a new battery in and SSD in my ageing Dell . Like a new one now, that an option

We’ve had quite a few Inspirons and they’ve been generally fine – certainly better than the couple of HP’s we had.

On the spec – I’d go with the faster processor as memory is easy enough to replace either. I don’t really like laptops bigger than 15″ or so though – mainly because I think you might as well buy a desktop instead of a laptop you don’t intend lugging about much.

I have an Inspiron 15R bought about 18 months ago. Been a good and solid performer, would recommend and buy another.

Had an Inspiron 17R for the past year. I’m not a fan really. Terrible battery life and something has come loose inside it. The performance has been less than great, but I think that’s more of a W8 issue than a Dell thing. I bought cheap-ish and I think I will be buying twice. Can’t see me keeping it another year.

Every HP laptop I have had is made of cheese. Horrible.

I would look at a refurbished Lenovo.

memory is easy enough to replace

Two points or order:
1 – Adding more RAM is not always possible, think of Apple and their soldered on chips – do check.
2 – See if there’s a free slot – 4GB of RAM with both slots in use will be a bit of a pain to upgrade as you have to remove both sticks and replace them, then flog the ones you just took out.

As I’m finding, this is not always easy. [Yes that a link to me flogging DDR3 desktop RAM – dammit would someone buy it?!!]

1 – Adding more RAM is not always possible, think of Apple and their soldered on chips – do check

I was aware of that but given budgets were tight I didn’t think Apple was likely to be an option. Seems crazy in this day and age that Apple still do that though.

If yer after a dell pm me. I have a few staff discount codes that you could use.