Dell - Inspiron 15.6" Laptop - AMD A8-Series - 8GB Memory - 1TB Hard Drive - Silver

So far the performance of the dell laptop is great. Other than the short battery life and occasional reboots I would highly recommend this computer.

This is an excellent laptop, much higher build quality then I was expecting. I love the backlit keyboard which was the main reason I went for this model. The lighting is really good, has two brightness levels, and the keyboard has a very nice high quality feel to it. The keyboard is tight feeling and quiet, not cheap and clicky feeling like the cheaper laptops. The number pad is also really nice. The touchpad also works well too. I don't really miss having a DVD drive all that much, my old one had it and I didn't really use it ever so I won't miss having that. The battery is underneath the bottom cover, it does lift up and out for replacement but it's not hot swappable like the older laptops. The battery life that I have gotten so far has been around 3.5 hours but that has been with fairly heavy usage including installing stuff on battery, I will update if the average goes up more with lighter usage. The fan on this does seem to run a little louder than my older hp but it's not really that noticeable unless you're in a totally silent room. That being said the laptop does stay very cool. The speakers are pretty good but you need to tweak them with the waves maxx audio and they sound great and are pretty loud. Another thing I like about this laptop is that on the bottom it has a nice easy access panel with 2 screws and you have easy access to the hard drive, wireless card (m.2) and the 1 ram slot (which maxes at 8gb anyways). Swapped the samsung spinpoint 5400rpm hard drive it came with for a seagate solid state hybrid drive and that made it quite a bit more responsive. The hard drive was definitely the bottleneck in this laptop but once I swapped the hard drive for an sshd it is much better, a straight ssd would probably make it even faster. The screen on the laptop get's really bright and then gets really dim for at night which is great. It also doesn't seem to be as shiny as some laptops almost like a bit of antiglare but yet not matte, it just seems to be a really nice middle of the road. Talking about the weight, this thing is quite light with it having no dvd drive and being thinner, I have it in my backpack and don't really notice carrying it unlike my older laptops which made my back hurt. The top cover is a nice brushed aluminum, really makes it seem like it's a more expensive laptop, the plastic also seems higher quality, not that shiny stuff that gets fingerprints all over. Overall I highly recommend this laptop for someone looking for a really high quality built laptop for under $500 with a backlit keyboard and who can live without a dvd drive.