The Inspilasted 5 hours and 33 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which involves continuous Web surfing at 100 nits. The notebook's 0.9-megapixel webcam captured noisy but accurate selfies that did a good job reproducing the color of my purple shirt and the red Purch wall. The notebook's two USB 2.0 ports, DVD-RW drive, headphone jack and Kensington lock slot sit on its right side. The Aspire One (15:08) also took a long time, but the Asus F555LA (6:31) finished in less than half the time.ĭell placed a USB 3.0 port, an HDMI port and an SD memory reader on the left side of the Inspiron 15. That's slower than the 5,400 rpm hard drive in the Asus F555LA (32.2 MBps), and the eMMC storage in the Aspire One (48 MBps).ĭell's laptop took its time in the OpenOffice macro test, needing 15 minutes and 3 seconds to match 20,000 names and addresses. The Inspiron 15's file-transfer performance is also low, as its 5,400 rpm drive copied 4.97 GB of files in 3 minutes and 16 seconds, for a speed of 25.7 MBps. That's predictably worse than the Core i3-powered Asus F555LA (2,080) and close to the Celeron-powered Acer Aspire (1,646). The notebook did poorly in the Geekbench 3 general performance test, notching a score of 1,568. Chrome slowed even further with six tabs open, pausing as I moved between already loaded pages.
That stuttering video performance may be connected to its single-band 802.11 b/g/n wireless modem, something of a relic when so many consumer laptops have dual-band 802.11 ac cards.
I saw stuttering while scrolling in Chrome with only two tabs open, and the notebook did not stream 1080p video smoothly. Our Inspidrew poor performance from its Celeron N3050 processor, 4GB of RAM and 500GB 5,400rpm hard drive. We found the best overall sound with the default MaxxSense preset. The Dell Audio utility provides presets for sound enhancement, including Gaming, Movies, Music and Voice.