Dell Inspiron 8500

I have owned this laptop for over 5 years. No joke. In that time I have upgraded the RAM and upgraded the HD - both to improve performance.

Recently, after 5 years that is, I have had to replace a burned out graphics card (I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did frankly), a dead battery and fried AC adapter. The dead battery was really my fault however, as I've used this thing almost exclusively while plugged in and the battery lost 90% of it's max charge a long long time ago.

If you're looking for a desktop replacement computer for anything other than high-end graphics work and/or high-end gaming, then this laptop will do.

I have a dell inspirion 8500. Windows performed an auto update for my graphics card and it was curtains after that. The screen drew funny lines and screwed the text on the screen. Windows crashed so I powered down the machine by holding the power button for 3 secs. When I switched the laptop on again the monitor was black and it would not boot up. You may as well say the laptop is dead. Im not impressed!

Dell support said it could be a static problem and that I should unplug power and battery then do a system reset by holding the power button for 10secs. This did not help and when I power up I get the same black screen! I do not recommend Dell or this laptop.

The other comments on here talk of Dell's horrible service, but in my experience their service is the best out there. This laptop works well for what it was designed to do. The complainers buy a laptop like this and expect more out of it than it was designed to do. Recommend the Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop to anyone!

It heats up, battery life is rubbish, and under the warranty they say certain things aren't covered, so make sure you read the small print.

I have a work laptop which I use too. It is an IBM Thinkpad. It is not as big as a Dell laptop, but it is durable, it lasts and it doesn't mess up as much as the Dell.

Basically, the Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop is a pile of trash, and if you are going to risk buying one, then make sure you get the extra on-site next business day support, because without it, you are going to be paying loads out every time it goes wrong.

The Dell Inspiron 8500 is basically a pile of junk and is no use to anybody. For the price you buy this, you could buy an Apple ibook.

My Dell Inspiron 8500 was delivered surprisingly rapidly in november 2003. At christmas the dvd player started becoming erratic in its operation. I sent it back to Dell and it came back 3 weeks !! later. Unfortunately they had changed the XP Pro to XP home and omitted to install many other programmes and also the dvd decoder, so no dvd. And quality control had signed it off as ok. They offered to send an engineer, but if they can't fix it in 3 weeks what hope? I was advised to sue by trading standards. Dell will not respond to my emails. AVOID unless you like grief. In my opinion Dell UK technical support is way below par!