Dell Inspiron 14 (Model 7437) review: Slim and stylish, but surprisingly sluggish

Dell’s Inspiron 14 7000-series laptops are sexy-looking beasts boasting forged-aluminum, beveled-edge chasses; 14-inch Gorilla Glass touchscreens; and backlit keyboards. But the absence of an SSD (as a cache or otherwise) has a significant impact on their performance.

These machines look like Ultrabooks, but they're not being marketed as such. Intel controls that standard and while it doesn’t explicitly state that a notebook must be equipped with an SSD to carry the Ultrabook moniker, the Ultrabook definition requires a notebook to operate in standby for at least seven days, and awake from standby with fresh data in less than three seconds. The Inspiron 14 7000 series (I reviewed the Model 7437) can’t do that with a mechanical hard drive, and it can’t be configured with one at time of purchase.

ROBERT CARDIN

Dell's Inspiron 14 7000 series cuts a super-thin profile despite its reliance on a mechanical hard drive. 

Apart from the absence of an SSD, this $850 laptop has a number of good components under the hood, including a fourth-generation Intel Core i5-4200U processor and 6GB of DDR3/1600 memory. But its 500GB mechanical hard drive spins its platters at only 5400 rpm, and its Intel Dual Band Wireless-N 7260 Wi-Fi adapter can connect only to 802.11n networks at a maximum physical link rate of 300 mbps. You’ll need a USB adapter if you want to network at 802.11ac speeds.

The Inspiron 14 produced a generally unimpressive Worldbench 8.1 score of 132. That renders Dell’s machine 32 percent faster than the Asus VivoBook S550CA that we’ve been using as a reference point, but leaves it far behind the consumer-oriented Lenovo Flex 14 (which has an SSD) and slightly behind the business-oriented Toshiba Tecra Z40 (which has a 7200 rpm mechanical drive).

There's no escaping the benchmark hit that a mechanical hard drive causes.

Looking at gaming performance—specifically, BioShock Infinite at resolution of 1024 by 768 with low visual quality—the Inspiron 14 slightly outperformed the Lenovo and the Toshiba, even though all three machines rely on the same integrated graphics processor (Intel HD Graphics 4400). It’s no gaming powerhouse, but it’s fine for less-demanding games like World of Warcraft.

The Inspiron’s 14-inch touchscreen is bright, beautiful, and clear, with excellent color accuracy, deep blacks, and crisp text and images. HD video looks very good on the Inspiron’s display, too. I noticed just a few artifacts in high-motion scenes. The touchscreen is smoothly responsive to multi-touch gestures, and the edge-to-edge glass allows for Windows 8 gestures to be performed quickly and easily.

The Inspiron 14 doesn’t have the most powerful speakers, but they sound better than most laptop speakers. They’re mounted on either side of the chassis, and they deliver just the right mix of bass and treble.

Gaming performance is fairly typical for a laptop with a fourth-generation Intel Core processor and integrated graphics. 

I did notice some anomalies in the Inspiron 14’s otherwise excellent industrial design. The chassis is much wider than necessary to accommodate a 14-inch display, with an unusually wide bezel at the sides and bottom of the display and more than an inch of dead space on the left and right sides of the keyboard. The island-style keyboard sits dead center in the chassis, a placement that renders the wrist rest cramped and uncomfortable. And why are the top row of function keys so tiny—they’re less than 0.25 inches tall—when there’s two inches of unoccupied space right above them?

The keyboard deck itself is flimsy—aggressive keystrokes cause the whole thing to sink slightly—and the flat keys provide very little tactile feedback. The aforementioned backlight provides very uneven illumination, giving the keyboard a marbled look. The touchpad, on the other hand, is quite good, providing swift, accurate movements and mostly smooth multi-touch gestures.

The Inspiron 14's battery life is slightly shorter than Lenovo's Flex 14 or Toshiba's Tecra Z40, but those machines have lower-resolution displays. It crushes our reference laptop, which has a third-gen Intel Core processor. 

I’m a sucker for thin, pretty laptops that deliver great battery life, and the Dell Inspiron 14 7000 Series certainly fits that bill (although it’s not particularly light, weighing in at 4.4 pounds). Since my computer life revolves around word processing, browsing the web, and watching the occasional online video, this model’s mediocre benchmark performance isn’t a showstopper.

You’ll need to decide for yourself if that—or its $850 price tag—are showstoppers for you. Lenovo’s Flex 14 costs $100 less, but it has a lower-resolution display and isn’t nearly as pretty. Toshiba’s Tecra Z40 costs considerably more, but its CPU has Intel’s vPro management feature set and it’s more than a full pound lighter.

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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D-Link DIR-868L 802.11ac Wi-Fi router review: Fast and surprisingly inexpensive

Don’t judge D-Link’s DIR-868L by its surprisingly low price tag. At the time of my review, it was street-priced a full $70 lower than the Asus RT-AC68U, even though it outperformed its competitor in several of my benchmark tests. Asus has a number of features the D-Link can’t match—but still, that’s a lot of cash.

Both routers are dual-band models that deliver throughput up to 450 mbps on their 2.4- and 5GHz 802.11n networks, and up to 1300 mbps on their 5GHz 802.11ac networks. Unlike Asus, D-Link hides the router antennas inside its cylindrical enclosure. D-Link allows you to create a guest networks on both the 2.4- and 5GHz frequency bands, and you may set these networks to be active only during a predetermined schedule.

ROBERT CARDIN

The D-Link DIR-868L is packaged in a visually interesting cylindrical enclosure. 

The Asus is the better choice for small businesses, but consumers are unlikely to miss having dual WAN and 3G/4G connectivity options. But like most high-end routers, the DIR-868L does provide VPN, FTP, and SAMBA servers.

Most consumers will be more interested in this router’s UPnP, DLNA, and iTunes servers. But they might be disappointed that D-Link makes them choose between sharing USB storage or a USB printer on the network: The DIR-868L has only one USB port (at least it’s USB 3.0). The DIR-868L also doesn’t have an onboard BitTorrent client.

D-Link has a good Quality of Service engine, but it’s not nearly as easy to configure as Buffalo’s router. The DIR-868L offers very little in the way of parental controls. You can limit access to approved sites, limit web access according to a date and time schedule, or block access from services such as peer-to-peer utilities, but that’s about it. And if you impose any of those limits, it impacts your entire network, not just the computers your kids might be using. If parental controls are your number-one priority, and you don’t mind limiting yourself to an 802.11n network, no router I’ve seen beats PowerCloud’s Skydog, even though that router is limited to 802.11n.

ROBERT CARDIN

One of the DIR-868L's few shortcomings is that it has only one USB port (but it is a USB 3.0 port).

You can configure the DIR-878L to operate as a router or (thanks to a recent firmware release) a wireless client bridge. It doesn’t offer TurboQAM on its 802.11n network, but that’s not a big loss. As a router, it delivered great performances in most scenarios, but it delivers very poor range as a 2.4GHz 802.11n network.

Each of the routers performed well when paired with a matching router configured as an 802.11ac bridge, but the D-Link DIR-868L performed especially well at close range (when the client was nine feet away) and when the client was in my home theater (an acoustically isolated room 35 feet away).

When I paired the DIR-868L with the Linksys WUMC710 802.11ac Wi-Fi bridge, it took a fourth-place finish once again. Its slowest performance came when the client was in my acoustically isolated home theater.

The D-Link placed fourth when I paired it with a Linksys WUSB6300 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter. But that finish isn’t as bad as it sounds, because the router significantly underperformed only when the client was in my home theater.

The DIR-868L’s 5GHz 802.11n network performed much better—in fact, it delivered the highest performance of all six of the routers I tested. It also had no problem maintaining a strong connection to the client when the client was in my home theater and in my home office.

The crappy range of the DIR-868L’s 2.4GHz 802.11n network will give you pause if you know you’ll be connecting legacy hardware to your network. It couldn’t maintain any connection to the client when the client was in my home theater or in my home office. If you don’t anticipate the need to support legacy devices to a wireless network, on the other hand, this won’t amount to a hill of beans.

D-Link’s router was one of the slowest at transferring files from a PC to a connected USB 3.0 hard drive. And since the DIR-868L has only one USB port, you can use it to share storage or a printer, but not both.

With a street price of just $150, D-Link’s DIR-868L delivers an outstanding price/performance ratio. It comes a very close second to the much-more expensive Asus RT-AC68U, although it doesn’t offer nearly as many features. And this isn’t the router to buy if you want to share both a printer and storage on your network, or if you need to support 2.4GHz 802.11n clients.

Michael manages PCWorld's hardware product reviews and contributes to TechHive's coverage of home-control systems and sound bars.
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