Inspiron 13 7353 (Skylake) SE Laptop - Review

My new laptop arrived a few days ago. Yay!
Time for a quick review.

This model (7353) is the Skylake version of the Special Edition Inspiron 13" convertible laptop. The current, regular edition, is 7359 but has a plastic case vs the chamfered aluminum & rubberized casing on this one.

Quick specs:
i5-5600U, 8GB DDR3, 128GB SSD (upgraded to 500GB), 3x USB3, SD Card slot, HDMI.

I was debating between this and the XPS15 (also XPS13). I chose this one as the XPS 15 is about 3 times the price but the differences (lighter, small bezel) aren't enough to justify the much higher cost.

Special Edition units don't come with Dell's passive stylus (regular ones do) but the passive stylus isn't much more than a cheap stylus you can buy for a few dollars. I already have one so I don't miss it.
I was hoping this version would support Dell's active stylus but they took out the digitizer from this laptop series starting with the 7352 (previous version of this laptop).

128GB is not much space these days (especially for a laptop) so I purchased a Samsung 500GB EVO SSD to go with it. When it arrived, I did a quick upgrade from the stock 128GB SSD (also Samsung) and am quite happy with the result.

The laptop screams now.

Here's the disk benchmark with the EVO SSD. As comparison, the stock SSD did about 450 on sequential read but about 100 on writes.

And here it is with RAPID (Samsung's memory caching technology) enabled:

That speed is insane! Can't wait to enable it on a server. Must have UPS though, as you're taking risk by enabling RAM caching* like this.

*RAM caching uses a portion of your computer's memory (which is really fast) as hard drive. It is much much faster than even the best SSD.

Overall, I wish this unit was a bit lighter (similar to the HP Envy X360) but it's good enough. The Envy is much more money and is weaker (harder to upgrade too).

So, how much did I pay? I purchased it from Dell Outlet with a $300 off coupon so it came out to a nice $459. I had a $150 GC so it was $309 out of pocket for me. :)

Thanks Slickdeals. You make me poor by saving money everyday.

Revival

Wow it's 2016 and my blog hasn't changed for years! Totally forgot I had a blog, lol.

Well, this year I'll try to do something with it.

I recently came across some blogs that gave me some ideas. There's a bit of content I could come up with that would be beneficial to others so I'll make an effort to share them this year. We'll see how that goes. Finally got off my butt to do some cleaning and changed to a new theme. Woot!