The Exterior

The body of the Dell Inspiron 15 i5547-7450sLV is surprisingly slim and elegant. You can really tell this devices is part of a newer generation of notebooks. On the exterior this laptop has the well known Dell silver and black finish. The top cover is finished in a brushed aluminum look with the Dell logo right in the middle in black.
On the inside we find the 15.6-inch display surrounded by a matt black screen bezel. Above the screen, in the middle we find the integrated Webcam and stereo microphones to the sides of the webcam. The contour is completed by the silver Dell logo in the middle of the bottom lip.
The top of the laptop is finished in matte black plastic. The power button is located in the top right corner. It features a full sized backlit chicklet keyboard in black. The touchpad is located slightly off center, but I think, that thanks to it’s large size it won’t be enough to stop it interfering while typing.
The status LEDs are located on the front lip of the palmrest. The two built in speakers are also mounted on the front just underneath the edge. From previous models with this setup I can attest it will muffle the sound if you use it in your lap or in bed.
The rest of the body and the bottom are covered in silver plastic to complete the exterior package.

The Connectivity

This laptop comes with the current standard of connectivity ports available on most devices. It has the Kensington lock port, power port, 1 USB 2.0 port and the Card reader on the left side. On the right side it has the Ethernet Lan port, HDMI-out, 2 high speed USB 3.0 ports and the now standard combo Headphones-mic port.
Due to its thin design the Dell Inspiron 15 i5547-7450sLV lacks a VGA-out and an optical drive.
On the inside if features Bluetooth 4.0 and Wireless Wi-Fi 802.11 ac/b/g/n connectivity.
I think that with such a light and compact device you will probably want to do a presentation or connect it to an external display. The lack of the VGA doesn’t help with this but you can get yourself one of these to solve this issue:

The Performance

The Dell Inspiron 15 i5547 comes as standard only equipped with ULV processors. This is the Ultra Low Voltage technology from Intel that helps lower the energy consumption of a regular processor by up to 50% without losing much performance.
In our case the i5547-7450sLV comes with the 4th Generation Intel Core i5-4210U processor running at 1.7GHz and can speed up to a maximum of 2.7GHz if required. This processor is the standard at the moment for this price range and that’s because it is a very capable one.
On top of this frugal processor Dell has deemed it fit for 8GB DDR3L RAM. DDR3L RAM use a very similar idea, by lowering the voltage of the RAM they can achieve much lower energy consumption overall without losing performance.
All this energy saving here and there results in an up 7 hour runtime out of this laptops 3-cell “smart” lithium ion (43.50WHr) battery according to Dell. In my experience and with some simple maths I can believe Dells claims.
As storage you get a 1TB 5400rpm HDD with this device. This is more than enough to store all your photos, videos and music and still have plenty left over for whatever comes next.
The only lacking thing is a dedicated video card. The Intel graphics HD 4400 is very much capable of running some major 3D gaming titles, barely, but it’s still not even close to what even an entry level dedicated video card can do. Intel has not been able to keep up with the industry as it did with its previous generations of graphic cards and I can’t recommend gaming on this laptop.
I think the overall package is very well balanced with plenty of performance from the processor to run any of todays applications and with the 8GB of RAM you can even do a lot of multitasking without much slowdown. It is also marginally capable of running 3D applications if it is needed on occasion.