Dell has consistently produced fairly powerful machines for business purposes. It’s new line of Vostro laptops aims to capture the hearts of working professionals from small to medium enterprises. These affordable laptops with great specifications come at an affordable price that’s hard to resist. However, these tremendous specifications on paper don’t really carry very well over to real-life performance, but given its exceptionally low price, it’s a minor disappointment we can still accept.
Design
The Dell Vostro 14 looks like a classic business laptop, nothing fancy about it, just a really professional and serious-looking machine.
The metallic Vostro has a premium matte-finish on its exteriors, which is appealing to those who really dislike glossy fingerprint magnet shells. The device also has a rather squarish look towards it, which further enhances its professional aura. However, some might find it a little too chunky for their liking.
For working professionals, the Vostro 14 is going to be quite a useful laptop given its variety of ports, including a VGA (for monitors or projectors), Ethernet, HDMI, 2x USB 3.0 ports and one USB 3.0 port with PowerShare.
Despite having a tapered-down design, the Dell Vostro 14 weighs 1.59kg, which isn’t very heavy on paper, but it’s not light either. Carrying it single-handedly is difficult, so don’t expect ultrabook-level portability.
The 14” screen has a matte design as well, which is once again a great thing to have, because let’s face it, who likes reflective glares? The resolution on the screen however, is slightly disappointing at 1920 x 1080p FHD resolution. It’s not shabby, but I wouldn’t use it as a media laptop.
Fortunately for the Vostro 14, its keyboard makes up for its sub-par display. The Vostro 14’s keyboard looks really chic, and even the font of the letters look suave. Keys are separated nicely so allow for smooth typing and its trackpad is also adjusted to optimum sensitivity so carrying a mouse isn’t really needed with the Vostro 14. ‘
Performance
In terms of user experience, the Vostro 14 does well for itself.
It sports an Intel® 7 th Generation Core™ i7 processor, which is supposedly some of the top of the line processors in the market, and with GDDR5 4GB video memory, the device is supposed to function rather swiftly.
The Vostro 14 took an acceptable amount of time to start up, between 10-15 seconds, I expected better, but it was still decent.
The device isn’t lightning fast, but its delay in response times are nearly unnoticeable when using it for day-to-day functions. I can run Microft Edge, Chrome, VLC Media Player, File Manager and Word all at the same time without having any frustrating delays.
On benchmark tests, the Vostro 14 actually performed decently. Running the Geekbench 4’s Single-Core and Multi-Core tests gave me 3802 score and 7334 score, which is comparable to .
The Cinebench tests gave a score of 37.12fps for OpenGL and 328cb for CPU.
Battery life was pretty good though, I used it continuously for around 12 hours before it died on me, mainly using it for productivy purposes and a little YouTubing when work gets boring, so its pretty commendable.
Should You Get It?
This is going to be a difficult question. Well, the Dell Vostro 14 at a price of $1,164 makes it an attractive midrange laptop for business professionals. It’s nice keyboard, keypad and variety of ports makes it a valuable addition to a SMB’s arsenal. The fingerprint sensor on board also adds a nice touch of security to it. It’s speed didn’t quite live up to its gorgeous specifications, but it holds up well as a business laptop The Vostro 14 is a well-balanced laptop that could most definitely be improved upon, but for its price tag, it is a pretty decent buy. Competitors like the ThinkPad E460 are capable of matching its speed and performance, however, they tend to be far heavier than the Vostro 14 despite holding similar specifications, so if you value portability in an affordable business laptop, that might be something you want to keep in mind when deciding whether to grab the Vostro 14.
