Dell Inspiron 15R vs HP Envy

[Stephen]

I'm looking at a couple of Black Friday laptop deals. One is a Dell Inspiron 15R - has a 3rd generation i-3 (3110M at 2.3GHz), 6 GB Ram, 500 GB HDD, Windows 8. The other is an HP Envy with 3rd generation i-5 (3210M at 2.5GHz), 6 GB Ram, 500 GB HDD, Windows 8. Both will be the same price.

Does anyone have experience with either or both of these laptops? I'm interested in comparions as to quality, overall performance, wireless performance, battery life, durability, and ease of swapping out components (like the HDD).

[nutball]

I bought a 15R last year as a christmas present for my step-daughter, and an SSD to replace the stock HDD to help speed it up. Boy, do I wish I'd read up beforehand. The HDD is screwed to the inside of the motherboard, so to swap in the SSD I had to completely disassemble the laptop (keyboard off, screen off, motherboard out).

[washu]

All other things being equal, the i5 is a fair bit faster, The 3210M can turbo up to 3.1 GHz but the 3110M is stuck at 2.4 GHz no matter what. The i5 also has a slightly higher max graphics clock.

Without knowing the exact specs of the other components it's hard to make judgments on things like wireless speed. Given the market segment they probably both come with single stream single band N wireless, or 150 mbps max.