A worthwhile desktop replacement: Dell Inspiron 17 7778 laptop
Gigantic Dell Inspiron 17 7778 2-in-1 laptop can handle just about any everyday task you throw at it.
Dell recently refreshed its Inspiron notebook line with a new batch of 2-in-1s that come in a variety of configurations and sizes. Within the line’s flagship 7000 series, the 17-inch models are held up as “high-performance,” compared to their 13- and 15-inch kin.
Aside from its convertability, the 17-inch model has moderately high specs and is also reasonably thin for a desktop-replacement notebook. It’s a bit chunky at six pounds, but that’s a pound less than the curvaceous HP Envy 17 with hp 593554-001 extended laptop battery. Its curved aluminum chassis makes it feel thinner than its .8-inch profile. To put its size in context, the super-thin Dell XPS 15 is .66-inch thick, so the Inspiron is just a tad more substantial.
Laptop Battery Life
One of the benefits of huge laptops is that they usually hold huge laptop batteries, but with the current trend of thinner-and-lighter, battery size often takes a backseat. With a laptop this size, which isn’t likely to be used for regular or extended travel, that might not be such a big deal.
Dell says this particular configuration of its Inspiron 17 is good for up to 7 hours, 25 minutes, which is a decent runtime for a notebook of any size. Unfortunately, in our 4K video rundown test we only achieved roughly 4.8 hours, or 293 minutes. That’s still respectable for a notebook that might be moved from room to room, and it will certainly get you through a movie or two on a long flight—of course, whether this notebook would even fit on a tray table is a different story.
For everyday work, this Inspiron handles itself just fine. At the heart of everything is an Intel Core i7-6500U, a Skylake CPU with two cores and Hyper-Threading that runs at 2.5GHz stock and can boost to 3.1GHz. It’s paired with 16GB of DDR4 memory, and graphics power is provided by a discrete Nvidia GTX 940MX module that has a tiny 64-bit memory bus and 384 shader cores. It’s a low-end part that’s only useful for light gaming, but it still offers a lot more muscle than integrated graphics.
Overall the Inspiron 7000 package is quite effective, though it’s questionable whether a 2-in-1 format makes sense on a device this size. Still, it’s nice to have that as an option. For daily desktop tasks it’s certainly fast enough. With its SSD and Skylake CPU, we never experienced any slowdowns, and the keyboard and trackpad are excellent.
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[…] Gigantic Dell Inspiron 17 7778 2-in-1 laptop can handle just about any everyday task you throw at it. Dell recently refreshed its Inspiron notebook line with a new batch of 2-in-1s that come in a variety of configurations and sizes. Within the line’s flagship 7000 series, the 17-inch models are held up as “high-performance,” compared … […]