THE SPECS

Intel® Core™ i5-2410M processor, 6GB DDR3 Memory, 15.6″ LED, 640GB SATA HDD, Wireless, Bluetooth, 6-Cell Battery.

THE HISTORY

I recently was in Arizona visiting some family and while I was there I helped out a relative pick up a new laptop. When I got there my relative had done her research and was familiar with the differences between i5 vs i3, they had also decided on a 15” screen and was pretty sure they wanted to get a Dell. Now although I’ve seen a lot of consumers become easily impressed by Dell and their ads, it was quite clear that my relative had done a great amount of research and had found that Consumer Reports was currently favoring Dell over the other brands she was looking at. It was great to see that someone had come to a Dell not based on Dells advertising.

THE SHOPPING

One morning we decided to head out and make the purchase happen. The previous night I had hopped online and did some research on the US laptop models that were available (there are often different models in Canada than in the US) so I was familiar with what we’d probably be looking at. After looking up some reviews and pricing, I agreed that the best bang for the buck was likely going to be a Dell model. We head out and shopped around a few stores and ended up coming across the Dell – Inspiron I15RN-5882DBK. Of course the choice was not mine to make so I showed a few models and after trying this out my relative was quite happy with how it felt. The purchase was made and we took it home.

THE UNBOXING

Over the years I’ve found that when I’m helping someone get a new computer most of the time I have to do transfer their data onto their new system; however, my relative did not want that done. I was looking forward to a fairly simple, out of the box setup. I unpacked the unit, set up the laptop on their wifi, and was ready to get a couple pieces of software installed – there was one problem though – the computer was dog slow. I looked at the Task Manager and found that as usual Dell had put a large amount of bloatware on their factory image, and this software was clearly doing more damage than it was good. As I prepared to clean this up I found myself laughing once again as I noticed McAfee (the stock anti-virus) was detecting one of these applications as malware. I finished my chuckle, disabled the bloatware and uninstalled the AntiVirus and replaced it with something better that my relative had. Instantly the laptop felt new.

CONCLUSION

I have to say that I was very disappointed with the out of the box performance of the I15RN-5882DBK. I can only imagine that had I not been around my relative would have been stuck using something that was unnecessarily slow, not to mention they might have returned it with the false virus notification. I’ve setup many laptops in my past and I’ve always found that Dells out of the box performance tends to be one of the worst. With their reviews getting better and better I thought maybe they would have solved this; however, clearly they haven’t. After I cleaned it up this unit did run quite fast and I was impressed with the speed. Would I recommend this laptop? If you’re looking for something for every day use with decent battery life, for sure – but make sure you have someone who can clean it up for you out of the box.