Dell Precision 5540

6owners with an opinion

80%of verdicts positive

1/0positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and software; criticized for battery and value.

What people wrote

NeutralOwned 6 years

Same boat, @6 year old Dell Precision 5540 here and am looking to upgrade. Dell's latest offerings aren't particulaly inspiring, especially wrt pricing (absurdly expensive for what you get). Seems that PC laptop manufacturers have taken a page out of Apple's playbook and charge through the nose for memory and SSD upgrades. To put in context, I paid $1,100 USD for this machine in October, 2019, and around another $200 for 2 X 512GB SSD and 32 GB RAM. So, $1,300 all-in. These days you're looking at least double the price. And if you're going to blow $3K on a laptop, might as well go with a MBP; at least there you're getting high end hardware. Giving up Linux after 15 years is a bitter pill, hopefully Asahi Linux will come out with M3/M4 support in the next year -- in the meantime I'll migrate my current machine to a Fedora VM on the Mac.

Doesn’t like itOwned 1 year

It says 14 hour battery life but how can anyone tell about future longevity? I usually find any other laptop than a macbook has poor long term life. For example I have my macbook (this isn't a pro Apple post but they have damn good battery life and power efficiency) that lasts 10 or more hours after 3-4 years and then a Dell precision 5540 that lasts 10 minutes after 1 year. These aren't exact figures but you get the picture. Is there somehow to calculate this comparison/benchmark against multiple workbooks with different hardware and claims with all the usage aside. Don't say "well if you use it more and has more apps open..." or "the operating system uses blah blah blah" just hardware specific benchmark agnostic of apps and os, etc.

Likes it

It's not perfect, but I'm very productive and happy using it. Windows 11 Pro on my Dell Latitude 5540 and it's a rock solid experience. I on principle always format my disk drive when getting a new PC and reinstall using an ISO downloaded from Microsoft to ensure no OEM software is on them. For my Dell the only thing I install is "Dell Command | Update" (not to be confused with Dell SupportAssist which is crap targeting general consumers). It's for updating drivers and firmware and it does absolutely no nonsense, only prompting me when a driver or firmware update is available. I use no third-party anti-malware, no "corporate management software", just Windows Defender, but with Dev Drive and exclusions to my working directories so everything is very fast for my development work with Visual Studio. My work is mostly developing for .NET and Electron which works on Linux and macOS as well. WSL with Visual Studio is super impressive that I can seamlessly debug processes running under WSL from normal Visual Studio. For Electron / NodeJS debugging I can use VS Code which also supports debugging processes running under WSL. I have done two registry tweaks to Windows 11 to remove a couple of annoyances: - I've turned off the "simplified" context menu which shows by default in Windows Explorer, otherwise most of what I need is hidden behind an extra click of my mouse. - I've turned off internet search results from showing on the Start Menu. This is a huge quality of life improvement,…

Likes it

I have a Dell Precision 5540 and it's a nice bit of kit. Fast, fully Linux compatible, good for gaming and dev with a decent onboard GPU. It's a bit pricy though.

Likes it

I got a used Precision 5540 (equivalent to XPS 15) after someone recommended it here on Hacker News and I've been pretty pleased with it. Newer versions (Precision 5560/70 etc) should be good as well.

Likes it

I really think articles like this can help drive Lenovo to go back to their old superior keyboards. However, apart from the missing [2019], should there not also be a [Sponsored] tag? The author's review can't reliably be seen to be unbiased (emphasis mine below). I just spent the better part of this past year year struggling with the Thinkpad P1, Lenovo's latest effort to compete with Dell's XPS 15 and Precision 5500 line. I had had a Precision 5510 in the past, which had been my favorite laptop of all time, except for some small issues that led me to explore Lenovo's latest. I was talking with the Dell folks recently about my experiences with (and general fussiness regarding) Linux laptops and **they offered to send me a new Precision 5540 to give them constructive feedback.** After a few days with the new machine, it was obvious that it was the machine for me and I shut down my Thinkpad P1 for good.