I’ve been recently looking for a Laptop for someone and came across the Dell Inspiron i7537T-1122sLV 15-Inch Touchscreen Laptop. It wasn’t a fit for the person I was looking for, but I still found it strangely good looking and reasonably equipped for its price range. I decided to give it a go over to see what it has to offer.
Dell Inspiron i7537T-1122sLV 15-Inch Touchscreen Laptop Review
The Exterior
The exterior of the Dell Inspiron i7537T-1122sLV is really the first thing that caught my eye. The entire body is finished in a metallic silver finish, the kind you would find on Apple products for example. Some of the body panels are aluminum with Dell even advertising that it has diamond-cut beveled edges. I mean look at this detail:
It is a very beautiful peace of design. Ok…I need to cool down and review it properly.
The top cover is finished in a metallic silver finish, with the Dell logo in shiny black right in the middle. The top cover has a beveled aluminum edge giving it a very solid look.
On the inside we find the 15.6-Inch 1366 x 768 pixel Touchscreen Display. It features 10-point Multitouch functionality so you can use all the features offered by the Windows 8.1 that comes with it. For something looking so High-end I would have expected a higher resolution screen. The upgraded version of this does have it, but we are talking of a completely different price range then.
The display is enclosed by a black rim underneath the glass. The entire screen is one solid peace of glass from edge to edge. The integrated Webcam is located in the middle of the top border and a silver Dell logo in the middle of the bottom border completes the display area.
The palmrest is finished in the same metallic silver with the keyboard and touchpad looking like they have been machined into it. It also retains the beveled metalic edge, just like on the top cover. The keyboard itself is a backlit chicklet style full size design with rounded off keys. It does look very inviting to be honest and it also having a num pad makes it very much funcitonal.
The touchpad is in tune with the overall elegant and basic design, it’s just a rectangular shape with a small grey line at the bottom. It is very large in size and although it is off center to not interfere with typing I think just due to its overall size it will.
The only other thing we can find on the palmrest is the power button on the top left corner above the keyboard. There is nothing else that might distract you from the actual act of using this laptop.
The Status-LEDs are small and located on the left side of the front edge. The built-in stereo speakers are located just underneath the front edge. I’m not a fan of this location as they do get covered up easily and muffle the sound.
It offers incredibly easy upgrade possibilities with almost the entire back panel coming off. Unscrew 4 screws and get access to your RAM, HDD, Battery and Cooling Fan. This is incredibly convenient for upgrades and cleaning out the fan in a few years.
The Connectivity
The very upmarket finish continues even with the connectivity. The ports themselves look machined out of aluminum. The connectivity itself is very good and slightly above its competitors.
On the left side it comes with the Kensington Lock port, the power connector and 2 USB 3.0 Ports. The right side continues with the Ethernet Lan Port, HDMI-out, 2 USB 3.0 Ports, the Headphone/Mic Combo-Jack and the card reader. Yes you read that right, this Dell comes with 4 (four) USB 3.0 Ports.
This does make up for the lack of a DVD-Drive and a VGA-out but this is slowly becoming the norm with newer laptops. You can always get a HDMI to VGA adapter to connect an external monitor.
On the inside it features Wireless-N 802.11bgn and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity as standard.
The Performance
The Dell Inspiron i7537T-1122sLV is available in multiple specifications, but the one we are looking at right now is equipped with a 4th Generation Intel Core i5-4210U processor running at 1.7GHz (2.7GHz with TurboBoost) and 6GB of DDR3L. Both the processor and the RAM are low voltage variants meaning they use less energy while retaining almost the same level of performance. This means more battery life for you with pretty much the same performance. This is a very smart combination and is mostly standard at this time.
The 6GB of RAM themselves are slightly below average for this price range, but let’s say we forgive it for looking so good and having a touchscreen.
The Intel Core i5 comes with the Intel HD 4400 graphics card. The previous generation HD4000 was a very capable graphics card and one of our favorite budget option. Well this one is about 20% better than the previous generation and that being said the improvement hasn’t been enough to keep up with todays gaming needs. It will still be able to run some of the recent games on low to minimal settings, if they even run, but for any decent gaming experience you need a dedicated unit.
The storage capacity come in the form of a 1TB HDD spinning at 5400rpm. This is on par with most of its competitors and will be more than enough for most users.
It seems difficult to find relevant information about the battery life of this laptop. It comes equipped with a 4-cell battery and based on my previous experience with 4th Generation Intel Core i5s I would say 6+-hours of battery life is to be expected from this Dell. If you get drastically less than this please leave a comment and I will update this section.
The large back panel is a big plus for this section as upgrading the RAM to 16GB or installing a SSD on this laptop will definitely keep it going for many years to come.
