Why You Can Trust CNET Dell Inspiron N301 review: Dell Inspiron N301
Dell's inexpensive Core i3 Inspiron isn't incredibly inspiring, but it's not intolerably insipid either.
Dell Inspiron N301
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Design
Inexpensive notebooks have the habit of looking, if we're going to be blunt, a little on the cheap side. Dell's Inspiron N301 — part of the company's Inspiron 13z series, which initially made it quite tricky to track down on Dell's local website — bucks that trend, with a silver finish that, while plastic, actually does look pretty good. Measuring in at 24x328x235.5mm, it's also relatively slender, especially for an entry-level system, although there's a minor price to pay for its slightly lowered profile. The N301 ships with an optical drive — it's a DVD+/-RW drive to be specific — but it's an external unit rather than being built in. If you don't use optical drives much you won't miss it, but if you want or need it, it's an additional item you'll have to throw into your laptop bag every time you go out.
Features
One thing you don't get with this particular model at the time of writing is a lot of customisation options, which is a rarity for a build-to-order company such as Dell. You can have it with an Intel Core i3-330UM 1.2GHz processor, or not buy it at all. Windows 7 Home Premium is your only choice. The only display option is the 13.3-inch LED 1366x768-pixel display that comes as standard. There's no option to upgrade the memory beyond 4GB, or the storage beyond 320GB, at least at the time of writing. The stock video card option is an ATI Mobility Radeon HD5430 1GB, although there we can't be too critical, as plenty of laptops sell with a single video card choice. Naturally enough being Dell, there's no shortage of other laptops you could purchase with plenty of configuration options. This just isn't one of them.
The N301 ships with two standard USB 2.0 ports and one combination eSATA/USB 2.0 port, as well as HDMI out, 10/100 Ethernet and a seven-in-one card reader slot. On the wireless front it offers 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1. On the software front Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit is pre-installed, as is a 15-month subscription to McAfee Security Center.
Performance
The N301's keyboard isn't the most stunning notebook keyboard we've ever hit, but it's perfectly serviceable in this price range. As you might expect, frills are at a minimum, with only standard media playback controls built into the keyboard and the trackpad acting simply as a trackpad. As a basic workhorse machine, though, the N301 works well.
This was borne out by most of the unit's benchmark scores. It managed a respectable but not world-beating 4038 in PCMark05 and a solid 3DMark06 score of 3107. You're not going to get top-flight video rendering out of a system at this price point, but for basic utility work and some light gaming it should be quite adequate.
The N301 ships with a six-cell battery, although Dell's specifications page for the N301 is curiously quiet about how long they reckon the battery will last for. In our battery test, running full-screen video with the brightness turned up to full and all power-saving measures disabled, the N301 lasted for two hours and three minutes before running out of juice. That's not a great battery score, although it is something of a worst-case scenario, and with careful usage you should be able to get a little more life out of this system.
Conclusion
For a system that costs under AU$1000 in this configuration, the N301 performs adequately. It's not a knock-your-socks-off type of system, and the external USB DVD drive will be a problem for some users, but at the price point it performs well enough to be worth considering in the rather bulging field of low-cost Core i3 competitors.