Review of my Dell Inspiron 1525

The first warning as to what I was getting myself into should have been the price tag.  Three hundred dollars for a laptop?  “Affordable” is often a synonym for “put together by our division of trained apes.” 

But before I get ahead of myself I should perhaps talk about the laptop itself.  The screen is just over 15 inches across.  It is easy to see provided you are not in direct sunlight.  The case is an attractive blue that I picked out of several colour options, none of which, I was surprised to note considering the company in question, are made from the unborn offspring of the worlds most endangered animals.  The keys are actually not annoying to type on like some laptop keyboards; I have to give credit where credit is due.

Unfortunately if I just wanted a comfortable keyboard then I would have purchased a keyboard.  The Inspiron worked reasonably well for the first year and a half of its life.  Then one day I decided to reformat and reinstall windows.  This should have been a simple process.  Alas, it was not meant to be.  Dell came with this preinstalled program called Dell Media Direct that existed on its own partitioned portion of the hard drive.  We peacefully coexisted for a time; I ignored it and it left me alone.  However, when it came time to reformat my hard-drive I ran into a little problem.  Through an obscure set of conditions, including having a partition of an amount of space that is a multiple of 4 (I believe), Vista was unable to properly reformat.  To be fair I had also created a second partition where I was running Ubunto, but when I searched the error code I saw other people with the same computer and the same problem so I can be fairly sure that this was the Media Direct partition's fault. 

Here is where the real problem with a Dell product began:  I called their tech support line.  One of the ways that they can give you a laptop for such a cheap price (besides paying their workers in bananas) is cutting back on their tech support.  If you are still under warranty then great!  If not, prepare to listen to an Indian gentleman inexplicably named Kevin explain that they can help you at the small cost of your first born child.  Or 50 dollars.  I can't remember. 

Beside badly thought out partitions and a tech support service that boarders on extortion, the laptop is mostly fine.  And by mostly I mean not even a little.  There is, for instance, this little problem where several of my keys stop working randomly, a problem that was shared with other users who noticed the same keys on their Inspirons failing.  Fortunately no one ever used keys like “T” or “R” or “G”.  For example:

“May od pu any ades up ei sos.” 

Of course sometimes instead of the keys not working they double click when you tap them, turning that into:

“May Ggod putt anggrry bbadggerrs up tthheirr shhorrtts.” 

The best part is that this goes in and out so you sometimes actually forget about it before turning on the laptop to find yourself with 8% fewer keys.   

And speaking of fewer features: I hope you are not overly fond of your DVD drive. About a week ago mine stopped working. It didn't just stop reading, mind you; It just doesn't have power anymore. I'd open up my laptop to see if I could fix it but, frankly, I know what happened last time.

Finally there is the issue where the laptop sometimes over heats and just shuts down without warning, which is ironic since it was forged in the deepest depths of hell.  One would assume that a cooling system that actually does its job would be in order, but who am I to question the Dell Chimp Platoon? 

Summery: Don't buy a Dell.  Seriously. 
Score: 1 out of five Apple IIEs  

Reviewed by: Leer's Poor Fool