Dell Inspiron 3542 is the budget laptop for the home users. This laptop is designed for the people who spend time on browsing, watching movies and basic day to day activities. I have been using this laptop from past 7 months. Here is my long term review on Dell Inspiron 3542.
My review unit of Dell Inspiron 3542 is powered by 4th gen Intel Core i3-4500U processor clocked at 1.7GHz. It has 4GB of DDR 3L RAM and 500GB of hard disc. Out of the box, it came with Windows 8.1 Home edition. However, It already recieved the Windows 10 update. Coming the performance, it is below average. The software, hardware integration is pathetic. The OS crashes often. Some times, it even refuses to turn on from the standby mode. The only way to deal with this to force restart. At times even a basic browsing feels frustrating. However, adding the 8GB RAM, helps a bit on performance improvement.
Dell Inspiron 3542 sports 15.6 inch True life LED-Backlite Display with screen resolution of 1366×768 pixels. In this laptop, Dell has used low quality display panel. The viewing angles are below average. It has poor brightness. The contrast and colours reproduction are also not satisfactory. Overall, the display quality nowhere feels like it is a 30k laptop.
Coming to connectivity options it does provide USB 3.0 and USB 2.0, HDMI port, Ethernet port and headphone/mic combi jack. Dell has equipped this laptop with one of the poor quality speakers. Hence audio quality from the speakers are not good. Audio via headphone jack is slightly better than the built in speakers. It has got decent keyboard but this cannot be said for the track pad. Once again, Dell failed to provide good quality trackpad.
Here is the summary of Dell Inspiron 3542 Review based on pros and cons.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Dell Inspiron 3542
Pros of Inspiron 3542
- Very good service support.
- Decent battery backup.
- Decent connectivity option.
- Easy to add additional RAM.
Cons of Inspiron 3542
- Low quality display screen.
- Poor performance.
- Poor trackpad.
- Below average audio output.
Verdict: At a price of around 30k, Dell Inspiron 3542 fails to inspire. Its cheap quality plastic build coupled with poor performance and low quality display screen makes this laptop unattractive to buy. Except world class post sales support, nothing exceptional on this device. For the price, there are many other option which provides better performance and build quality. The budget Asus Eeebook 205 has better build and performs way better than this laptop.
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