I'm thinking of buying a laptop from Dell, Is this a good deal?

by Ginny
(Oklahoma City)

It's an Inspiron 15 Laptop, and it's $399.99 today. They say it's $184 savings. I was thinking of getting it for my daughter who is a junior in high school.

ANSWER

If you are referring to the Presidents Day Special, it is not a bad deal. The processor is a Pentium Dual Core T4500 which is faster than most of the processors you will see in computers in this price range. Usually the processor is an Intel Celeron processor or one of the slower AMD processors. The laptop should be about as fast as the laptop I'm working on now which was several hundred dollars more expensive when it was new.

This computer is the type of that is good for a person who doesn't play hard core games and primarily uses the computer for word processing, some spread sheets and web surfing and e-mail. You can down-load and store a lot of music and pictures. I have the same video accelerator in the computer I'm on now and don't have any problem streaming video or watching DVDs.

If your daughter is a junior in high school, this computer should be expected to last her through high school and one or two years of college no problem. After that it will seem slow because the software keeps adding bells and whistles aimed at the newest and latest laptops. Notebooks a little older will not be able to keep up.

If you do buy the computer, I would recommend a good laptop case if your daughter will be carrying it with her. I have seen a lot of information that says that a third of laptops suffer serious damage because of drops or falls. I know at least three people who have had to replace their laptops in under two years because of that.