Dell Inspiron 15R review

The laptop’s built-in speakers, unusually located beneath its lower lip rather than in a bar in front of the screen, are loud enough and fine for spoken word content, but all but the most simple music sounds muddy.

It took a while before we were accurately touch-typing on its keyboard, but its flat, widely spaced keys provide a decent sense of tactile feedback as you type. There’s no numeric keypad, so the entire thing feels a lot less cramped than many other laptop keyboards. Needless to say, if you have a lot of numeric data entry work to do, this isn’t the laptop for you. A large trackpad is situated in the centre of the wrist rest, directly beneath the shortened space bar. It’s big enough to provide plenty of fine control over your pointer, but not so large that we were constantly hitting it by accident.

The 15R outclasses most similarly priced laptops when it comes to its range of ports, simply because it has four USB3 ports, but that’s it apart from 3.5mm MIC and headphone ports and a Gigabit Ethernet port. It also has a built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi adaptor and a DVD-RW drive. If USB3 connectivity is particularly important to you, then this laptop’s well worth a look, but for around £20 more, you can get our current Best Buy winner, the Acer Aspire V3-571, which has a better screen, a longer-lasting battery and a more powerful processor.