I think I’ve bought 10 different Dell laptops in the last 8 years or so. They’ve all done their jobs admirably apart from one memorable XPS laptop which can only be charitably described as a piece of poo. That laptop gave me nothing but troubles from day one and despite Dell’s best efforts (and 4 or 5 on-site visits from a tech) could never be made to work correctly. To Dell’s credit they gave me an exchange computer to replace that computer and the replacement (a Vostro 14″ machine) has been flawless.

Anyway, my partner has been using a 15.5″ consumer grade Inspiron with Windows Vista for the last 4 years and it was starting to have some problems. I hate fiddling with computers to fix up glitches, especially 4 year old computers that are well past their use-by date. So rather than fix that PC off to the Dell Australia Outlet Store I went. I’ve had some luck picking up cheap machines and monitors from there in the past so I thought I’d try my luck again. The only criteria for the new machine were that it be a laptop, that it have Windows 7×64, and it have 8GB of RAM. There we a couple of likely prospects, one of which was an Inspiron and the other was a Vostro 3560. Ten minutes on the phone to Dell told me that the Inspiron wasn’t available any longer but the Vostro was and the purchase was made. 5 days later the new machine landed on our front doorstep.

The Dell Vostro 3560 seems like a nicely built machine. It’s certainly much nicer to handle and look at than the old Inspiron clunker it replaced. 4 hours of fluffing about with it last night as I moved the data from the old machine to the new one showed no problems at all with performance being snappy. Hardware wise the USB ports are a trifle stiff to get plugs into but the monitor is excellent with a 1920×1080 resolution. Even with a titchy 15.5″ monitor everything was quite readable at this resolution.

Of course this is no long term test but after 12 hours in our life the Dell Vostro 3560 laptop has done what it’s supposed to do perfectly. Recommended.