Anybody have details about this model? Inspiron 14 7000 Series Details | Dell Malaysia Strange that there's not much coverage on the web. Can't find important details like: Ease of upgradability? Maximum RAM amount? Any M-SATA slot? Comes with recovery disc?
You won't find it on their sales website. You need to go into their tech support site. Check out the spec PDF here - Product Support | Dell Malaysia But the safest option is still to download their really comprehensive service manual and check out the location and number of available slots. AFAIK, Dell no longer ships the recovery CD because they use a recovery partition on the HDD itself. But you can pay for a copy of the Windows CD if you want.
Had to dig through both service manual and specifications PDF in order to find all that stuff. Strange how there's so little coverage on this model, usually by now one of the mainstream notebook sites should have already done a review with more details available. And the Dell store is really dumbing down with each iteration. Used to be clearly stated whether you'd get a restore or OS installation disc, and the option to add it for (RM5? RM10?) for some models... now all that is completely gone. Would rather use a restore disc or OS installation disc for clean installs rather than doing drive cloning.
You should be able to burn the recovery DVD yourself with the included Dell Backup and Recovery software. Or just boot to WinPE and copy the *.wim out yourself.
They usually keep the recovery files in a separate (hidden) partition, so you can still restore from it even after formatting the user partitions.
Don't really like those recovery partitions that much. ... If your HDD dies, it's gone. ... While it's there, it does nothing and eats up space. ... When you change drives, you have to go through the drive-cloning shenanigans. Whatever happened to good ol' installation discs. Even better, separate OS and Driver/App discs, so you can choose only to install what you want, and not make one sweeping restore, complete with bloatware and all.
Cost cutting for the media (CD), after sales support since it is easier to do recovery now instead of the cumbersome CD installation.
Yeah, it's all about the money. There are ways around this if you must have a DVD. Just create your own recovery disc, as Dashken suggested, or clone the HDD to a DVD, so you can restore it if anything bad happens.
Ah well, ended up ordering an Inspiron 15 7537 instead. I'll see how easy/hard it is to make a bloatware-free restore disc when it arrives.
There used to be one or two other configs available when this series was introduced, and this current one was the best config among them. Only problems with this model is the single SATA HDD and possibly wifi reception issues; I'll probably replace the HDD when prices of 1TB SSDs drop in the future, and see if there's any need to replace the wireless card.
Really? What kind of reception problems? The Intel Wireless-N 7260 BGN should be quite good. From my experience, Intel WiFi modules generally outperform Dell's own WiFi modules. The HDD should be the 1 TB Seagate Laptop SSHD, which is surprisingly pretty decent for a 5400 RPM hard disk drive, especially when the SSD cache is just 8 GB in size.
There were enough complaints about it on the notebookreview.com forums that it is a legitimate concern, and the suggested solution was to replace it with the Wireless-AC version of the card. In any case, I have an old Centrino card lying around in case I do run into wireless issues. Either that or source a new Wireless-AC card from the net.
My laptop arrived this morning. Looks all fine and dandy. No problems with wifi reception. The thing comes with surprisingly very little bloatware - the big ones are just MS Office trial and McAfee; a few other small utilities like Dell software and some annoying facial recognition system too. Haven't looked at making a recovery/backup image yet. Not important for now, still need to go through updating hoop and then getting all my data and software onto the thing. Then figure out how to get the Spyder4 colorimeter to work with Optimus. Also, I wonder if everyone else is using a local account or their MS account to login? I've always used the MS login for tablets but not so sure for this one.... (edit: NVM, did some research and discovered OneDrive integration requires signing in using an MS account... so looks like I don't have an option...)
I hate the integration. Why must it use my MS account for my Windows login???!!! Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk
Keyboard needs getting used to... keys are quite squishy, and I'm not used to having a numeric keypad at all. Keep hitting 4 instead of Enter, Num Lock instead of Backspace. At least the display is quite decent.
i like the integration. sync the acc profile across all my devices. including the config for file explorer, cmd etc.. so I dont have to repeat the same steps over and over again working like azure AD :green:
Not sure I would want my desktop to work like my tablet... Thankfully the store is basically useless for desktops, but relatively important for a tablet without keyboard.
