Design
Brushed aluminum on the lid and palm rest, plastic for the rest. It’s a cheap trick, but it’s an effective one pick it up and it feels pricier than it is. The hinge holds firm, the chassis barely flexes, and the textured bottom keeps it from sliding around on your lap. From a few feet away you’d never guess this wasn’t full metal.
Get closer and the plastic shows. Fair enough — you’re not paying for a unibody here, and Dell put the aluminum where your hands actually go.
Display
14 inches, 1366×768, glossy a resolution that was already behind the curve when this thing shipped. For email and Word docs, fine, you won’t think twice. Sit by a window, and that glossy coating kind of turns into a mirror, so you might start wishing for matte instead . The viewing angles are okay not exactly good, sort of acceptable. If you share the screen with someone next to you it still holds up, but if you tilt it back too far then the colors begin to wash out, kinda like they fade away.
Performance
The i5-3210M does its job for the boring stuff — browsing, email, Office. Push it a little more into that intense zone, and you’ll smack into the wall pretty quickly. With 6GB of RAM, yeah it was pretty generous back then, it still leaves a decent pocket of air for the usual multitasking, like a browser plus a couple of background bits and pieces. And the 750GB hard drive, plenty of room to stash your stuff, though it’s still that spinning platter type, so the boot timing tends to crawl, kind of, honestly. Honestly, if I owned one of these now, an SSD swap would be the first thing I’d do — it would probably do more for how the machine feels than anything else you could change.
Graphics run on Intel HD 4000. Video and casual photo work, no problem. Gaming? Don’t bother.
Battery
A 48Wh, 6-cell battery gets you roughly 5 to 7 hours doing light stuff. Crank the brightness or lean on the CPU and that number drops fast. Enough for most workdays if you’re not pushing it — not enough to stop watching the percentage.
Ports
Two USB 3.0, one USB 2.0, HDMI, VGA, an SD reader, Ethernet, and a headphone/mic jack. Nothing missing, nothing extra. Wi-Fi is 802.11n, Bluetooth is 4.0 — both did their job without ever making me think about them, which is about the highest praise wireless hardware gets.
Keyboard and Touchpad
Decent key travel, a comfortable layout, and a numeric keypad squeezed onto a 14-inch chassis — a small win. No backlight, though, so typing in the dark means turning on a lamp.
The touchpad is roomy and tracks well, with pinch-to-zoom and two-finger scroll working as expected. It uses physical click buttons instead of an integrated clickpad — some people will like that, some will think it’s a relic.
Software
Windows 8, plus Dell’s usual extras: SupportAssist, Power Manager, Backup and Recovery. Useful once, then mostly ignored.
Bottom Line
This is a laptop for people who need email, documents, and browsing to work without too much drama or stuff like that. The screen, and also the hard drive show their age a bit, and honestly it’s never going to wow anyone with speed. Still, it’s built solidly, the keyboard is genuinely pleasant to type on, and the ports cover pretty much what you’d actually need. If you are not hunting specs and you just want a machine that does its job every day, then it’s a reasonable purchase.
Dell Inspiron 14R i14RMT-7475sLV 14-Inch Touchscreen Laptop (Moon Silver) [Discontinued By Manufacturer]: Buy it now
Dell Inspiron 14R i14RMT-7500sLV 14-Inch Touchscreen Laptop (1.6 GHz Intel Core i5-4200U Processor, 8GB DDR3L, 1TB HDD, Windows 8) Moon Silver [Discontinued By Manufacturer]: Buy it now
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Tech Reviewer & Product Analyst
Định Bia has spent over 10 years testing consumer electronics with a focus on smart technology. He work as a product advisor at Biareview where he helped customers find the right devices for their needs. He personally tests every product featured on this site using a consistent evaluation framework covering quality, durability, and value. All reviews are based on experience, not influenced by the manufacturer.