I bought this laptop new in 2015 to replace the Inspiron 5030N, but performance with Windows 7 was always dissappointing. The end of support for Windows 7 pushed me to move over to using Linux as an everyday OS, and it performs so much better. It's an OK laptop, though I don't much like the keyboard which is why I tend to use the Inspiron 1545 more, and because it's quite thin the finning on the CPU cooler is scant, so the fan has to run almost all the time even with light CPU loads. I like the screen though. The CPU is an Intel Core i5 5200U, RAM is DDR3 upgraded to 12GB and the HDD has been upgraded to a Toshiba 7200rpm 500GB unit. The OS is Slackware 15.0. :-)
For some reason this laptop complains about a supposed invalid partition table with the replacement HDD, however this was created afresh with fdisk in the Slackware installer. The same happens with an alternative non-original HDD as well, and there are no SMART errors. It seems to be some kind of Dell stupidity designed to dissuade people either from using drives not bought from Dell, or perhaps to dissuade using non-Microsoft OSs. Whichever way, hitting any key gets rid of the error message, so it's not a major problem.
