Dell Inspiron 1520 Laptop Review

This laptop was my first computer and my first major electronics purchase; it replaced the family computer for me, and since I got it with 250 GB of hard drive and 2 GB RAM (well, it seemed like a lot to me), it does pretty much everything our desktop does. More, actually, since it has more resources. I have no problems with the laptop physically; the keyboard is good and the layout is fine, and I like the extra buttons for volume. I got it refurbished from Dell, too, which was especially great since it cost about half as much as it would have to get the exact same specs on the exact same computer new.

The problems...well, I'm not sure whose fault they were. It came to me broken, and I had an insane amount of trouble getting it just to function. It sometimes wouldn't start up and would give me a blue screen of death completely randomly, usually after five minutesor less of use, so I really couldn't do anything with it. Troubleshooting on my own did no good; calling tech support was worse, because while they tried to be helpful, the people  on the other end 1) believed it was a software issue and therefore not covered by warranty, even though the errors varied so widely that it was impossible to pin down one software that could be causing it and 2) pretty much kept telling me to do the same useless things, and we'd get halfway through their step-by-step instructions before I'd realize they were just telling me another way of doing something I'd already done--and then they didn't listen when I said I'd already done it.

The Dell Support forums were very helpful, though--there I was contacted by  Dell guy who actually read my post and actually thought about my issue, and agreed immediately that it was hardware. It took a while, but he kept e-mailing back and forth with me until we got it fixed, which included sending me new RAM cards and a new hard drive in case that was the problem--and then paying for me to ship the laptop back and replacing the processor himself, since that turned out to be what had failed.

In other aspects, it's not terribly portable, but as a slightly more portable replacement for a desktop, it's pretty good.