Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Series (7548)

Editor's Notes

The Dell Inspiron 15 7548 is looks like good value on paper at first glance. Intel Core i7, AMD Radeon R7 M270 graphics card, 16GB RAM, 1TB or 256SSD hard drive, Ultra HD touch screen 3840 x 2160 and backlit keyboard. The 1TB model comes in at £829 while the 256GB SSD model retails at £879.

Looking at the above it definitely looks like good bang for your buck and I would advise shelling out the extra £50 for the 256GB SSD model. Believe me, you will feel the difference in speed over the standard hard drive. If you really need more storage you can always get an external hard drive or cloud storage which just keeps getting cheaper. Since I tried a computer with an SSD anything else just won't do any more.

Now, for the laptop itself. The asking price seems reasonable looking at the i7 CPU and UHD screen. However, for most task an Intel Core i5 would be sufficient. The i7 really benefits gaming but due to the AMD Radeon M7 270 not being that powerful it really negates any gaming benefit you would expect. That UHD screen looks tempting but note that Windows 10 doesn't work nearly as well yet on high DPI screens. While the new Universal Windows Apps scale well the legacy apps such as Adobe Creative Cloud suit does not. For that reason I don't believe that the high resolution screen is a selling point.

The keyboard is backlit which for some user is a must, however Dell decided to take a page out of Apple's book and not included the numeric keypad which I don't think is acceptable for a 15 inch laptop.

Thanks to the solid build and reasonably attractive design Dell Inspiron 17 7548 could have earned Editor Choice Award. However, as Dell packed in features such as i7 and a UHD screen that present no benefit to the user but only increasing the price of the notebook I can't give it my award. I would suggest looking at the Dell Inspiron 15 5558 instead.