Almost a year in! A review of the dell inspiron 13 5000 2 in 1.

Well, it's been almost a year with my Dell 2 in 1. Some thoughts.

It has been a pleasure to use every day since I opened the package. Even when it was running the normal HDD and 4 gig of ram it was fairly quick and smooth to use. I did some photo editing with the stock configuration with no slow downs etc. Ditto for video creation. I then added 16gb of ram, and installed a 2tb SSHD. Then things were much quicker.

I have read the reviews of this device and they mentioned the monitor of it. I have no issues with the screens brightness or color reproduction. It's on par with my sons MacBook air. We have side by side tested them. Mine is the cheapest model available from dell with the non backlit keyboard, no windows hello camera, and the "slowest" processor. I saved a good amount of money buying this configuration and use the saving the upgrade things that mattered, extra storage, maxing out the ram is much more important to me than a little higher clockspeed, a hello camera and backlit keys.

My wife and I travel quite a bit and is the reason I picked smaller devices for us. (she has the Inspiron 11 3000 2 in 1). The weight of my notebook is light, easy to carry and is slim in its form factor. The only downside is not a downside of the device but rather windows. Windows 10 still is lagging behind a lot in the "app" side of things. Take texture for example. I cannot use the texture app to read magazines on windows 10, I have to memu the android app to do it.

Other than that, it's been great!

 

As an addition to this, I have just ordered a 24" dell touchscreen monitor to use with this notebook at my desk instead of purchasing a separate computer. Should work really good together. Stay tuned for the review of said monitor.

 

Just hooked up my Dell 24" touchscreen. ITS AWESOME. My combo works amazing now. Full touchscreen on my desktop running either windows 10 or memu with android is amazing!

 

I think Dell does a pretty good job with its convertible notebooks. The 16GB of RAM was a good upgrade for sure. However the 2TB SSHD ...I bet that's slow. Better off putting in an SSD and using external storage. If that's not an option, then the 2TB SSHD will have to do. (Unless, of course, you feel like shelling out a pretty penny for a 2TB SSD).

Thanks for the write-up.

Charles

 

Actually, It made quite a difference in speed. I have notebooks with full SSD and my dell with SSHD, and my wifes dell Inspiron 11 3000 has a normal HDD. There is not a HUGE difference between my SSD and SSHD devices for most tasks. The HDD system is MUCH slower. The SSHD is a great compromise of speed and storage. I am using it because we travel alot, so I don't want to carry around extra stuff. Storage for photo and video editing on my device is needed.

 

The SSHDs may have gotten better since I last used one, but I'm still convinced that A) the naming convention is designed to mislead consumers into thinking they are buying an SSD; and B) that most of the perceived speed difference is placebo (at least, it was for me). I believe they do SOMETHING if you have a fairly repetitive list of things you do e.g. they can cache what you are doing, but they're still just hard drives.

Charles

 

I am going by what I have seen personally in my devices. I have a MacBook with a SSD in it, I have an acer 17" notebook with an SSD in it...I have my Dell with the SSHD, and my wifes dell with the normal HDD. The SSD has a speed advantage over SSHD, however the difference in the speed is not near the speed gain you get from going from the HDD to the SSHD. SSD are in fact the fastest drives. BUUUUTTTTT the SSHD, is a clear speed advantage over the normal HDD and without the storage drawback of the SSD. Which was a big concern for me.

 

These two videos are exactly the results I experienced with my drives.





The firecuda is even faster than the momentus XT too. As are SSD so the difference is even greater compared to the 7200 RPM spinning drive now.

 

Love my 5000

 

Me too. It hits way above the sum of it's parts. It's not for gaming but for EVERYTHING else it works great, and fast. Nope...not as fast as the xps, but it's close to macbook pro fast. Judgeing by what we have experienced here. Putting all of them up against each other encoding videos.

 

Just got the latest round of bios and driver updates from Dell. There is a noticeable increase in speed of the deivce. mostly after the video driver updates. The touchscreen is even more responsive now too!

 

After using the device for a couple of weeks with the latest updates. I noticed my battery life dropped a bit. Anyone else with the 13 5000 notice this?

 

Just got my 13 5378 and have to say battery life is awful. I would say I get 3-4hours from my i3 7100u on low back light. Looking inside amazed to see how small the heatsink is expecting issues in the future because under load hitting 70 degrees c How do you find it?

 

I get about 6-8 hrs battery life just surfing and watching videos. Temp is no big deal to me. if I start stressing the system with photo / video editing , The fan starts and stops again within 10 seconds or less. I am pleased with my notebook for sure.