Most ultrabooks are expensive but speedy laptops around the £1000 mark, however this Dell Inspiron 14z-5423 ultrabook attempts to buck this trend by costing half of that. Lets see if this budget Dell ultrabook can carve its own, quite wanted niche. It is available from John Lewis exclusively at £599.95 with a free two year warranty.
Well if you are looking for an ultrabook then you are requiring, small form factor, powerful processing power, a good battery life and stylish looks. Now at this price there has to be compromises, but lets be honest, not everyone needs a £1000 laptop! So what has been left out to make the grade? Firstly it looks great. The chassis of the laptop is very thin (much thinner than it looks in photos) and although it is not a unibody design, it feels sturdy. The battery is also very good, at a quoted seven hours. This is impressive for such a thin laptop and should see most people throughout an entire working day.
The performance is the one area on paper which you see the compromise. Instead of the £1000 ultrabooks Core i7 and SSD powered machines, you get an Intel Core i3-2367M combined with 4GB of RAM and a large 500GB hard drive. If you are not sure about computers you may see some cheaper PCs with 6GB RAM and think they are faster. 4GB of RAM is more than enough for even heavy day to day tasks with Windows 7. The performance is solid and is not that far off the Core i5 ultrabooks that have normal hard drives like this does, rather than SSDs.
The advantage of having a traditional hard drive is you get much more space for a lot less money. With 500GB you have plenty of room fro even the most keen photographer, or movie fan. Speaking of which the screen for those movies is very good. It is a HD screen and comes with the built in Intel HD graphics card, which allows playback of High Definition movies. It wont play the latest commercial games with full quality, but older games and online ones like on Facebook it will run smoothly and fast.
This 14z-5423 is also packed full of connectivity options. This means you have plenty of USBs for your external mouse, iPod, camera etc.Unlike some ultrabooks the Dell 14z-5423 also has a DVD drive.
Overall this is a great value laptop and is very worthy of a purchase. If you want portability, but without the high price tag of many ultrabooks, then this could be the one for you. Plus because it is from John Lewis it comes with a free two year warranty and 90 days free software support.
Price: £599.95
Available From:
Dell Inspiron 14z-5423 Ultrabook, 4GB RAM, 500GB hard drive, Intel Core i3 Processor, Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, Microsoft Office Starter 2010
