Looking for a budget laptop for the kids? Or need one powerful enough for design work or gaming? Dell offers a huge variety. We help you decode the different families, and present the top performers (and values) in our testing.
If you’re shopping for a laptop, you have torrent of options to choose among, be it a thin mobile companion or a hefty, rugged notebook, with a vast range of options in between. Where even to start? Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to narrow down your options based on what you know. And sometimes that’s a brand you’ve long used and trusted. If you’re familiar with Dell, you probably have some opinion regarding how reliable the company’s products are, how its customer service works, and the general quality of the user experience that those products and services deliver. If you’re brand-loyal, it’s a reasonable way to whittle down your options, while still helping you zero in on a great product. Picking a brand you trust does half the deciding for you. Whether you’re after a powerful laptop for crunching numbers at work, or a laptop for staying productive at home or on the go, there’s a good chance that Dell has a model you’ve considered buying. The company has solid machines at all levels of the market. Decoding Dell’s Key Laptop Brands When you’re looking at Dell’s laptop product line, you’ll want to concentrate on which of its six main families of laptop best meets your needs. The ones to familiarize yourself with are Inspiron, XPS, Alienware, G Series, Latitude, and Precision. You’ll find both clamshell and 2-in-1 convertible entries in all of these families apart from the two gaming-oriented ones. Inspiron: The Mainstream Choice For use in home or school, Dell’s Inspiron brand comprises consumer laptops of every stripe: power machines, inexpensive “just enough” machines, big displays, ultracompacts. Whether you’re editing photos or managing your home finances, Inspiron’s copious options fit both screen-size and budget needs for most buyers. These machines are mostly Windows models; if you want something a little less expensive for simple tasks and browsing online, consider Dell’s Chromebooks, which put basic functionality into an affordable package that works great for kids and students. Dell breaks its Inspiron line into three gradations or levels: 3000,5000, and 7000 series. As you go up that stack, you tend to see more premium features, and higher relative pricing. The number between the word “Inspiron” and the series number is typically the screen size of the laptop; an Inspiron 13 5000, for example, would be a 13-inch-screened laptop with middle-field characteristics.
