Dell Inspiron 1545

15" Dual Core T4300 , 2.1 GHz, 800Mhz, 1M L2 Cache Laptop

I am not much of a computer guy. I'm an audio/video guy so this is a little out of my jurisdiction. To be honest this laptop was on sale the week of December 10th 2009 and I was in search of a Christmas gift for my wife. The main reason I picked this was because it is customizable & comes in different colors (like green with stripes for example). It was really a joint gift to use around the house. It is important to note that the firewire port is no longer included in this line. It came with windows 7 (64-bit) Premium, which is an operating system that is new to me. The most evident new feature is the dock (which I uninstalled because I wasn't used to). The new look and layout is nifty. It was very easy to set up a home network between my old XP machine and new Windows 7 machine. The big down side that sucked all the wind out of Windows 7 for me was the incompatibility between Microsoft Office XP software. I bought the MS Office package in 2003 with Word, Excel, Power Point etc and because the new Windows 7 OS is 64 bit it is not compatible with the old MS Office software. I actually called Dell and they instructed me to buy the new 64-bit MS Office package for about $150-$200. I was annoyed and to avoid paying for the software again I set up a remote desktop connection that allows me to access the old MS Office XP computer from the new Windows 7 laptop over the home network. It's not a perfect situation but it works for me for now. The built in wireless works great. The built in camera is mediocre at best. The battery life is long enough to watch a movie, so that is good. Bottom line: It's a great home laptop for email, internet, pictures, video, music & Netflix. If you want to do heavy duty editing & processing go with something more robust.

Connections:
(1) VGA - 15HD Out
(1) Audio - 3.5mm Line Out
(1) Microphone - 3.5mm In
(1) Ethernet - RJ45
(3) USB 2.0
(1) 7 in 1 Media Card Reader
(1) Half Mini Card Slot

Check it out: Dell Inspiron 1545