The Bottom Line
Dell's Inspiron 1525 has some of the lowest price offerings available if you are willing to shop around for special offers. Be warned though, Dell has a wide range of configurations and often a system with poor specs can end up with a higher price tag than another. Because of this, shoppers need to be very vigilant about what the Inspiron 1525 comes with. With some vigilant shopping, consumers can end up with a very strong laptop PC for a low price.
Pros
* Excellent Value With Incentives
* Strong Core 2 Duo Processor
* Lots of Hard Drive Space
Cons
* Wide Range of Models Makes Shopping For Proper Configuration Difficult
* Less Than Average Battery Life
Description
* Intel Core 2 Duo T5750 Dual Core Mobile Processor
* 3GB PC2-5300 DDR2 Memory
* 250GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive
* 8x DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Burner
* 15.4" WXGA (1280x800) Wide LCD Display with 2.0MP Webcam
* Intel GMA X3100 Integrated Graphics
* v.92 56Kbps Modem, 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11b/g Wireless
* Four USB 2.0, FireWire, ExpressCard/54, 8-in-1 Card Reader
* 14.1" x 10.1" x 1.5" @ 5.9 lbs.
* Vista Home Premium, Works
Guide Review - Dell Inspiron 1525 Budget Laptop PC
Dell's Inspiron 1525 is one of the oldest system designs currently on the market. As such, there are a lot of different configurations offered by the company via retailers, resellers and even from their own web site. Prices can be all over the map and will depending upon what is in the configuration, who the seller is and what offers they have currently. Because of this, consumers need to be very careful of the configuration they are looking at buying.
A good example of how much fluctuation there can be in a configuration, Dell offers the Inspiron 1525 with very low end processors like the single core Celeron M 550 up to high end Core 2 Duo T7000 models. In the configuration that can be found for under $750, consumers can get the Core 2 Duo T5750 that offers a good level of performance for the budget market. This can be combined with 3GB of PC2-5300 DDR2 memory to let it run the Vista operating system smoothly. Often times, the memory configurations may be 1 or 2 gigabytes.
Storage is another area where the configurations can very. For the most part, the Inspiron 1525 now comes standard with a dual layer DVD burner, but some earlier versions and lower cost models come with a CD-RW/DVD combo drive that can't record to DVD. Hard drives also vary from 120GB up to 320GB. The most common configurations seem to feature a 160GB but 250GB was the configuration that I was able to find which is large for the budget laptop market.
The battery life for the Inspiron 1525 doesn't seem to have kept pace with newer offerings from other companies. Users should expect less than two hours of usage on a charge and more closer to one hour with heavy usage with the Wi-Fi network enabled.