Dell Inspiron 1501 Laptop Review

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The Dell Inspiron 1501 is a 15.4" widescreen notebook now available with the AMD Sempron, Turion or Turion X2 processor. The Inspiron 1501 has a subset of the Intel based Inspiron e1505 features and carries the same basic design and build as that popular laptop. Unfortunately, Dell cut features on the Inspiron 1501 but didn't cut its price a whole lot relative to the e1505. Unless you really want an AMD processor, it's hard to recommend this machine over the only slightly more expensive and better e1505.

The Inspiron 1501 reviewed here is configured as follows:

* AMD Sempron 3500+ (1.8GHz/512Kb)
* 15.4" Ultrasharp WXGA display
* 512GB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz (1 DIMM)
* ATI Xpress 1150 256MB HyperMemory (Integrated graphics)
* 60GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
* 24x CD Burner/DVD Combo Drive
* 6-cell 53 WHr lithium-ion battery
* Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition
* Dell 1390 802.11g Mini Wireless Card

Build and Design

The Inspiron 1501 matches much of the Dell lineup clad in painted silver with white trim on top and a black underside. The color scheme is simple and there's nothing to rave or rant about honestly, I'm not a huge fan of the white trim "bumpers" though. Also, as time goes by the current Inspiron design is becoming stale, Dell needs to update their consumer laptop look, and soon. The Inspiron 1501 is in fact precisely the same look and build as the Inspiron e1505 -- except several media buttons are missing from the 1501, more on that later.

The notebook is sturdy enough to feel comfortable lifting it by one corner. It's not rugged or as well built as many business laptops, such as a ThinkPad or Dell's own Latitude line -- the screen latch is plastic as opposed to metal on a Latitude for instance. But the Inspiron 1501 is not flimsy by any means, the only real flex I could find on the casing was at the top just above the keyboard.

The back of the screen is plastic, but very sturdy and a hard push won't make ripples appear. The hinges are sturdy and well damped. As mentioned before, the screen latch is plastic, but I'd rather have a plastic latch than the magnetic opening mechanism that some manufacturers are using -- they're so invariably hard to open.

One knock against the build is that Dell uses a plastic dummy to fill in the slot for the ExpressCard opening when it's not in use. It looks cheap, feels cheap and awkward not to mention the plastic piece is begging to be lost if you remove it. Unfortunately, many manufacturers use this approach instead of integrated flaps to protect the notebook from dust when the slot isn't in use.

Screen

The screen on this Inspiron 1501 is the WXGA (1280x800) matte screen. Overall the screen is fairly sharp with nice saturated colors and high contrast. Brightness is good, next to my everyday ThinkPad T43 it certainly stands out as being much better. The lamp for backlighting is at the bottom of the screen, you can feel the bottom of the screen being slightly warm as an indicator of this, but light leakage is minimal so by looking you couldn't really tell where the light is coming from -- in other words the screen is evenly lit.

One very positive thing I find with this screen is that there's no "sparkle" or graininess sometimes complained about with other Dell screens. When you're viewing a white screen it is indeed all white, you can't detect any unwanted artifacts. This is the first matte screen from Dell I've had in some time, usually I go for glossy, which is better for things like DVD viewing but annoying for working long hours with in office environments due to screen reflection.

As forementioned, brightness is good. When on battery you could bump the brightness down (using Fn + Arrow Down) to level three or four out of seven and still have very comfortable viewing.

The vertical viewing angles are quite poor, meaning that if you look at this screen at an angle other than perpendicular (head on) then colors will look odd, usually darker than intended and contrast will be whacky. So long as you're viewing head on this isn't a problem.

Speakers

The speaker performance of the 1501 is fine. In the world of notebooks, they are quite good even. Of course there is no bass but they seem to play low enough to make voices sound natural. They also play loud, for a notebook, without distortion. They point forward, and project the sound into a room so several people could easily watch a movie.

AMD Sempron Processor and Performance / Benchmarks

I've been spoiled of late reviewing a bunch of Intel Core 2 Duo laptops. Boy is the AMD Sempron ever a reality check as I merge into the information technology equivalent of the slow lane.

So why did I choose the Sempron knowing it would be slow? Basically, I wanted to buy this AMD based laptop for cheap, the price I got before taxes was $559. I think the whole selling point for the Inspiron 1501 is that it's kind of on par with the Inspiron e1505 but cheaper -- at least you would think. We'll investigate whether that holds later.

Anyway, I digress.

From a perceived performance standpoint, the Sempron 3500+ laptop with 512MB of RAM "feels" slow. MS Word doesn't open immediately, it takes a couple of seconds. Web page rendering feels sluggish at times. If you get hyperactive moving the cursor around Start menu programs then you'll notice icon graphics taking a while to render. If you go to the Add or Remove Programs Control Panel feature in Windows it takes a long time to populate the program list (you loo

k at "please wait while the list is populated" for at least 15 seconds upon entering that for the first time). And multi-tasking can be a bit of a slog, while ripping a CD and opening thePCMark05 benchmark program I clicked on the "show desktop" icon and nothing registered for quite some time as the system tried to keep up with all the tasks being demanded of it.

However, in all fairness, if you're more a "one thing at a time" person and don't juggle between programs or try and do 10 things at once, the Sempron will get you through what you need. Of course any Office application works fine and surfing the web is quite seamless, although web page rendering can sometimes be noticeably slower on this laptop.

Let's look at some benchmarks to get a feel for how the 1501 configured with a Sempron stacks up.

PCMark05 gives a good rating for overall system performance, as you can see below, the 1501 with a Sempron is quite a bit slower than Core Duo and faster AMD machines. (Read more at http://www.notebookreview.com)

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