The Dell Inspiron M501R is a 15in laptop with a triple-core 2.2GHz AMD Phenom II N850 CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. It costs $999, and, although it will appeal to students and home users, business users who want something fancier than a typical corporate laptop will be able to get a lot out of it to.
It's equipped with HDMI, VGA, USB 2.0 (four), 100Mbps Ethernet, and eSATA ports. There is also an SD card reader and a built-in DVD burner.
Our benchmarks indicated that the Dell Inspiron M501R is not only useful for office work, but also for tough multimedia tasks such as transcoding video for your iPhone.
This Dell laptop doesn't offer fantastic battery life, unfortunately. It lasted only 1hr 31min in our worst-case-scenario rundown test; if you use a power management scheme and don't have the screen at full brightness you will be able to get more power out of it, however.
Overall, if you're looking for a well-rounded Dell notebook and don't want to spend too much money, the Inspiron M501R is worth considering. That being said, it lacks some of the features business users might find useful (for example, there's no ExpressCard slot)
Original review by Elias Plastiras, PC World Australia.
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