Advantages:
The computer arrived in a plain brown box which I approached with some trepidation. But inside was a computer that was obviously refurbished but in no way abused or broken. It showed signs of use but the keys were all there and working and that Chassis showed no damage or shock. It worked right out of the box with one exception (see cons below). Windows 7 Home Premium X64 installed and worked like any new laptop install. Glad to see it had the optional 1440X900 screen, plus a decent dual-band N wireless card and Bluetooth. There's also a cellular card installed, but I didn't pay much attention to it because I don't plan to use it. The 250 gig SATA drive was a Seagate 7200 RPM unit. The unit also had the optional 9-cell battery and appears to be a good, solid battery. There was no crapware installed, but there was Not many business-oriented programs. Speed is very good, but the laptop gets hot. A vent on the left blows out really warm air. The only media supplied was two DVDs for Windows Home Premium, one for 32-bit and one for 64-bit. This is a welcome addition. There is a folder on the hard drive with all the Dell drivers, but one wonders how old they are .
Disadvantages:
One thing that made me angry before I found out. This laptop has a modular bay where the DVD is installed. Apparently it can take another SATA hard drive with an adapter so RAID can be used. Well, apparently this laptop came with only 1 hard drive but in the BIOS it was set to RAID which made the modular bay inactive. I thought the DVD was bad at first but it was spinning fine even though it didn't show up anywhere. I had to change the SATA -Change interface to AHCI to make it work. Unfortunately this destroyed the HDD which the BIOS was set to RAID to operate. Luckily I installed an SSD so I could set the BIOS to AHCI and continue. I'm not sure what to do if you want to use the original hard drive and DVD. This is quite a shame and might make an inexperienced user return the laptop because g believes the DVD is defective. Oddly enough, the DVD magically appeared for a brief period while I had the original hard drive, but then disappeared. I wasn't paying enough attention at the time to guess the exact circumstances. The Pointing Stick -Input device is about useless. It's like the top part is broken off. It can be used, but it's difficult. It's not a killer bug since you have the touchpad.
Overall rating:
This is a pretty good deal for the money, although I miss USB3. I bought this laptop mainly because the Lenovo Ultrabook I bought a few months ago is terrible for typing and I'm a writer. I love the backlit one Keyboard of this device. Typing is comfortable and the touchpad works as desired although it is small.
