The Dell Inspiron 15 3576 is a solid entry-level laptop that offers surprising performance and battery life considering its humble origins. The 8 GB of DDR4 memory is adequate, and a second SODIMM slot is available for a future memory upgrade if needed. Meanwhile, the swap to an SDD leaves the system feeling quick and responsive without the long boot times and application load times we have come to expect from mechanical drives. Even better, the system's low power consumption of 25 watts at idle and 44 watts with the display at maximum brightness under excessive load leave it incredibly power efficient for the performance on offer. It even stays fairly quiet with the fans ramping up only under heavy load, and even then, the system remains below 42 dBA at a distance of 1 foot/30 cm. The only downside is the BIOS update it takes for maximum performance as Dell shipped the unit with the older BIOS which have no Turbo option. This limits performance and causes some oddities depending on the test. A BIOS flash resolved all performance issues, resulting in a great system without serious thermal throttling during testing.

Battery life is impressive as well with the system managing nearly 5 hours in the media playback test and over 3 hours in the PCMark 8 Home Conventional battery test. Add to that its solid build quality in regards to the case and you end up with a system that should hold up reasonably well if treated properly. That said, Dell has some areas they need to improve; the trackpad feels cheap with the bottom right and left corners having a great deal of flex. Using the right or left buttons, they depress nearly twice as much on their edges as in the middle. This concerns me as it gives the impression that the trackpad may not hold up over time. Other vendors are offering keyboards with backlighting, but that feature is missing on the Dell Inspiron 15 3000. Finally, there is no M.2 slot on these models; Dell requires you to buy their next tier to get access to faster PCIe-based SSDs.

While I am glad to see an HDMI port for expanded display options, it is limited to version 1.4a, which means 3840x2160 resolutions are stuck at a maximum refresh rate of 30 Hz. Obviously, on an entry-level laptop, this is not a huge issue, but it's still something I would have liked for use with the living room TV. That said, it's only a problem for playing back 4K 60 Hz media files since the Intel integrated UHD graphics 620 GPU won't be doing any real gaming, especially at 4K. You can likely eke out 720p in some titles, but it will not be an enjoyable experience. However, more casual titles should be fine.

Overall, the Dell Inspiron 15 3576 is a solid entry-level offering that just needed a bit of enthusiast tinkering to shine. It won't wow you with high-performance graphics and is not going to let you render out 4K footage or do real content creation. However, what it will do is let you watch YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, browse the web and perform basic tasks with more than enough performance left on tap to keep the system feeling snappy and responsive. Just remember to swap the HDD out for an SSD for maximum benefit.