Dell Laptop

Annie1960

I'm just about to buy a new laptop. Considering the Dell 15 inch 5000.

One version has 256 GB SSD, plus 1TB HDD. £569 on Dell website. The other one is similar but has 512GB SSD and no HDD, £629.

Are both of these decent mid-range laptops for general home use? Skype, Zoom, internet, email etc?

Any comments or alternative suggestions?

MinuteNoodles

Yes both are fine. The first one is the better option if you're the kind of person who likes to keep lots of large files such as videos and high resolution photos etc that take up lots of space. The second one is more aimed at people who want to have a lot of applications or large programs installed at the same time but not necessarily needing the large storage capacity as it'll allow them to have more programs installed on the SSD drive for faster loading.

neilmcl

Annie1960 said:

I'm just about to buy a new laptop. Considering the Dell 15 inch 5000.

One version has 256 GB SSD, plus 1TB HDD. £569 on Dell website. The other one is similar but has 512GB SSD and no HDD, £629.

Are both of these decent mid-range laptops for general home use? Skype, Zoom, internet, email etc?

Any comments or alternative suggestions?

There's also the newer Dell 15 5000 model, also with the 512GB SSD for £599.

Annie1960

neilmcl said:

There's also the newer Dell 15 5000 model, also with the 512GB SSD for £599.

Ah yes, I did take a look at that, but it has a different chip, and when I googled the difference the reviews seemed to suggest the other chip was better. I'm not really sure, though, how much difference there is.

Also the one you suggest only seemed to have 4GB RAM, you would have to upgrade to get 8MB which seemed a nuisance to me.

Not sure if the above points are correct, but that's how it seemed to me!

MinuteNoodles

Annie1960 said:

Ah yes, I did take a look at that, but it has a different chip, and when I googled the difference the reviews seemed to suggest the other chip was better. I'm not really sure, though, how much difference there is.

For what your intended usage is CPUs became more than fast enough a decade ago. For at least a decade the bottleneck for most people hasn't been the CPU it's been the hard drive. Computers you try today which seem dog slow are dog slow because of the mechanical hard drive. I have an old clunker Thinkpad T60 circa 2006 on an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU. I upgraded the hard drive to a SSD and it massively transformed that machine, wife uses it for the same things you do.

neilmcl

This is the one I was referring to It does have 8GB of RAM and the newer i5-10210U is pretty much just as good as the i5-1035G1 in real terms.

Annie1960

I contacted Dell a couple of days ago to ask what  '8GB,4Gx1 + 4G onboard' meant. They told me there was a space for another 4MB RAM, but I would have to upgrade to get it!

Annie1960

So what is it that makes laptops overheat?

TheRightOne

Annie1960 said:

I contacted Dell a couple of days ago to ask what  '8GB,4Gx1 + 4G onboard' meant. They told me there was a space for another 4MB RAM, but I would have to upgrade to get it!

That is not what that means. It means that 4 GB of RAM is not user removable. The other 4GB is removable. So if you want to upgrade to more than 8 GB, you'll have to replace the removable 4 GB module with an 8 GB or higher capacity module.

mgfvvc

MinuteNoodles said:

Yes both are fine. The first one is the better option if you're the kind of person who likes to keep lots of large files such as videos and high resolution photos etc that take up lots of space. The second one is more aimed at people who want to have a lot of applications or large programs installed at the same time but not necessarily needing the large storage capacity as it'll allow them to have more programs installed on the SSD drive for faster loading.

The SSD will be much faster and the best choice for almost everyone.

Very few people will need more than 512G and the HDD will slow the system down considerably.