Customer Ratings & Reviews

wow. ok... heres the deal. Either buy this one and be prepared to spend more money, or just spend the extra for the models with upgrades pre-installed. Windows has just gotten to be such a complex system that standard HDDs just simply do not work anymore. This comes with a spinning hard disk drive, brand new and out of the box it slows to the point of freezing, and many built in apps wont even launch. I bought this one because the upgraded model with more RAM and faster storage didnt have the disk tray or a USB-C port on the front. With this one, you should also buy an SSD. This motherboard has a spot for an M.2 SSD but does not have the screw to hold it in place. Either buy the 2.5" SSD and a bracket to replace the HDD or go buy the M.2 screw beforehand and get an NVMe M.2 SSD. You should also buy a new pack of RAM. This has 1x8gb stick installed and 2 slots. I haven't owned it long enough to look into the max supported amount but you could get a 16GB pack, 2x8GB sticks and vastly improve the experience. The Core i3 is more than enough for most tasks, even some very light gaming. It comes with embedded graphics and a pretty weak low profile power supply. Again, i haven't looked into upgrades so i don't know yet if you could fit a standard sized power supply into it but you'd need one for more than the lowest powered graphics card you can buy today. I've added a photo of the RAM use at idle, running only the app version of Firefox from the Windows Marketplace app store. I've already put in an SSD.

Bought this for homeschooling, worked for our needs. Was slow to boot up at times, but overall a good value

This Dell Desktop Inspiron 3891 is great for home, small office, student use. Dell has been a work hours for PCs for as long as I have known. Setup was super easy. Plug and play. It came with mouse and keyboard. All you need is a monitor. It went through a whole slew of Microsoft updates that took about 4 hours to get through. So after that I was completely up and running. Comes with Windows 11 home edition. It actually looks nicer than the regular version. I was able to run 2 monitors. 1 off of VGA one off of HDMI. I benchmarked this product and it was per spec. i3 @ 3.7Ghz 8 Gb Ram HDD 912 Gb. Out of box used 51 Gb. Comes with built in wifi. But I used hardwired Overall would recommend for simple use. Any heavy lifting like massive graphics will cause slow down. Young student, parent, or just using for Internet and clerical work this will be just fine. Anything more I would not recommend. Also the Hard drive is not solid state so it does have some noise when reading/writing.

Excellent Purchase for value and performance. Very fast performance any time. Windows 11 is totally improved and efficient. Self installation is flawless

You can not go wrong with a Dell computer. Nice to have DVD RW drive.

I've had a laptop for the last several years (also a Dell) and decided to get a desktop again. I like the portability of a laptop and will still use my laptop for travel, but I like the ability to customize a desktop. This Dell desktop, the Inspiron 3891, is perfect for a student, an older person or someone who just wants a basic computer. Out of the box, it comes with a small tower, a keyboard & mouse. I'm sure you can order it with a monitor as well, but I already have a monitor. I also have an aftermarket keyboard & mouse that I use, but the Dell keyboard & mouse are fine as a backup. Startup runs you through the usual things: registration, setting up Windows 11 and connecting to your home network (via wi-fi or Ethernet). Once you've connected to a network, there are updates to install, from Windows, Dell and the various programs installed. The computer comes with a month's free anti-virus from McAfee, which gives you time to figure out if you want to renew that or get a different program. Windows 11 was new to me, but doesn't seem all that different from Windows 10. There are a few cosmetic differences, but you can adjust the interface to look the way you're used to or try something new. This computer comes with a 1 terabyte hard drive and 8 gigabytes of RAM. The hard drive is a mechanical hard drive, not a solid state, so it's not as fast as it could be. For a speed boost, at some point I'll probably switch to a solid state hard drive and add more RAM, since there's a vacant memory slot. There is a slot on the motherboard for a NVME/M2 hard drive, so you can add a second drive for additional storage. On the front of the tower, there is a DVD/CD reader/writer (something you don't see much of anymore), a headphone jack, three USB ports and a newer USB-C port. On the back of the tower there is an HDMI port (for connecting to a monitor) as well as an older monitor port for non-HDMI monitors. There are also 4 USB ports on the back (2 standard speed, 2 higher-speed), a speaker connector and a Ethernet port for wired internet. The power cable connects to the rear of the tower. Access to the inside of the tower is easy, just unscrew 2 thumbscrews and remove the left-side cover. There is plenty of room to work inside if you want to change or add any components. This is a good system if space is an issue. The tower is 13” tall, 6” wide and 11 ½” deep. Perfect for a small desk or table. Performance is pretty basic. This is not a gaming PC, just one for internet browsing, basic word processing and light gaming. Microsoft Solitaire comes with the computer, I played it and some Diablo 3 (with the graphics quality turned down a bit) and it did just fine. Since it has the DVD/CD drive, you can play audio CDs and watch movies (DVDs, not Blu-Ray) as well. Though most of the computer seems well-made, the front of the DVD drive is somewhat flimsy. I almost pulled it off when removing a CD, so be careful with it. All in all a pretty good, basic system that will serve most peoples' needs quite well.

Don't let the rating fool you. By no means am I saying that this is a bad PC. This actually a very good starting point. A great foundation, if you will. This is the Dell Inspiron 3891 series and it is so very upgradeable PC. You start off with tower with enough ports and slots to make a monster of a rig. It come with a usable keyboard with 10 key and a basic mouse to get you started. There's really no instructions in the box. Two little booklets. Ittie-bitty folded pamphets. But not to worry. You won't need them. If you've got some good speakers, one aux cord aught hook you right up. HDMI port for easy HD monitor connectivity. 1 USB-C port , multiple USB 3 ports and USB 2 ports. The side panel is easily removable for all for any all enhancements you want to make. Most importantly, there's wifi support. The previous iteration(3881) had a slot for DVD-RW drive, but this one actually has the drive installed. the SD card slot needs to be opened. But everything else is readily available. I do have to say, For a core i3 system running Windows 11, it does run pretty slow. Start-up takes forever over wifi. But all in all, for the $499.99 usd price point, this is clean, well designed starter kit. I recommend this anyone in need of their first PC. It's makes for a great secondary PC for the home.

Great PC for a small office/home office. Very good specs and many available ports on the front of the tower (3 usb type A and 1 type C) and many more in the back. It has more ports in the back, including a HDMI video out, a VGA out (for older monitors) and more USB type A ports and an ethernet port. They were nice to include a basic keyboard and a mouse. Putting the PC together was easy, I had only to provide my own monitor. It does have enough horse power to work as a basic workstation for a home office/small office. It doesn't have the most powerful hardware, but can take any basic work I use it for my small home office. I can use the web, pay my bills etc on it fast and without any problems. It's a no frills PC, very well put together, highly recommend it for this type of use. Oh, it also has an optical drive btw, I haven't use one for a long time, but they include one. Plenty of hard drive space too, 1TB is more than enough for my small home office. If I need more space in the future, I can add an external drive, as this PC includes lots of Super speed USB ports. Highly recommend it for a home office if you want to save some money and have a PC that just works out of the box!

Being a PC builder for over 30 years, this little "Mini" Tower is geared more toward light usage or maybe a student for homework, light (and I mean light) gaming and web browsing/consumption. When I removed it from it's box, the 1st thing I noticed was it's extremely light weight and small case. Should be easy to find a spot for it. In the box is the PC itself, power cord, wired mouse, wired keyboard and a quick start guide. Note, you must supply your own monitor. I used a spare FHD monitor I had lying around and also my Samsung 4k TV to try it out. Setup is fairly straight forward when you power it up for the first time. I noticed a sound I haven't heard in a LONG time and that was a mechanical HDD. Once powered on and going through Windows 11 setup, it took roughly a little over an hour and a half. Ouch. Struggling with just the initial setup was a warning flag for me. Once done, I proceeded to remove all the bloatware and the "free" trail of McAfee to free up cpu usage. Ran a "little" smoother after that, but even my old Phenom II 965 BE build from 2006 can power on, get to Windows login and start watching Youtube a LOT faster than this. Other than that, video consumption and web browsing was perfectly fine. Ran a couple of lightweight titles including some RTS games which only hiccupped a couple of times loading. Do not even try to play newer titles. It won't be pretty. The tower itself is surprisingly well-built. Easy access to the insides via 2 Thumb Screws. Inside you will find it's powered with a 260w proprietary PSU, has a 1TB WD Blue Mechanical HDD, 1 single stick of 8gb DDR4 RAM and some crazy cooling contraption for the Intel i3 10th gen. Here is where I would HIGHLY recommend some upgrades. First get yourself an SSD. Crucial, Sandisk, Samsung... Once installed and clone your original HDD, the PC will be 10x better. I had a spare 1tb 870 EVO Sata drive, installed it and cloned the WD Blue and Boot time went from 2-3 minutes to about 30 secs. 2nd - Upgrade to a minimum of 16gb of RAM. 8 GB is just BARELY enough to do anything let alone multi-tasking. I was scared to open up more than 3 Chrome Tabs in fear of crashing lol. Remember, this is just an entry level PC. If you are just wanting to browse the internet or stream a movie, than you'll be just fine. If you choose to upgrade it, Dell made it easy to do so and it will let you throw a little more at it and not break a sweat. There are a couple more slots for you for add ons. 1x NVME Slot 1x PCIe x1 Slot 1x PCIe x16 Slot 1x DDR4 RAM slot 1x SATA I took a picture for size comparison if you need one. Far right is a Full Tower, Middle is a standard Mid Tower and the left is the Dell Tower itself. I'd recommend this PC for anyone just needing to do light work or web browsing on. Nothing more than that unless you upgrade the parts.

This PC is a good entry level computer. The setup took less than 10 mins. I was even able to use this computer just off of our wifi and not hard wired into our router. It was really slow but still functional. Once hard wired it worked smoothly. The key board feels great. The mouse I prefer to be wireless but still functional. We use this computer for zoom meetings, spreadsheets and a few apps for church. Online searching is clean and clear. Over a good home computer, nothing fancy.

What an amazing little computer! I needed two basic systems to do video editing using Pinnacle Studio software. I was willing to add a video board and possibly upgrade the power supply if necessary. As it turned out, the systems ran the software with no added video hardware. Nowhere do they say you can add 16GB ram memory but the computer did support this configuration. I purchased a 32GB memory upgrade as 2 16GB boards and plugged one into each of the computers. They now each have 24GB ram -- a configuration that is not a documented option. But we've been running them at 24GB for almost 6 months with no problems. There's also an amazing assortment of front ports. Finally, we were prepared to purchase an external USB DVD writer but these little systems come with a drive. In today's market, DVD drives are more and more rare. These little computers were a perfect fit for our needs. One note is that there's really no way to cleanly change out the power supply if you need to add a power-hungry board but fortunately this computer completely matched our needs.

Ok some important things coming from an I.T. professional. Even with downsides I plan to buy a few more. Good: 1:Wifi is solid AX and strong 2:NVME support 3:Actually good 8gb ram stick (see below) 4.Quiet 5.Small and light 6.Don't let i3 scare you 10th gen and up are beast Bad: 1:Does NOT support video over USB on front or rear but has a vga port for 2nd monitor. Yes not all USB supports video (cheap Dell did not put in this model) 2:Ram is 3200mhz even though system does not run at that speed and WILL NOT (no settings to allow it). Tried several sticks of 3200mhz ram and none would boot. Seems system is limited to 1.2v ram sticks (less common and often considered budget ram) so be careful if buying ram. Settled on CT2K8G4DFRA266, this is the fastest system will run and is 1.2v. Use the ram that came with it in a better system that can take advantage of its speed. 3:Absolutely useless with the HDD it comes with and a must replace. If you plan on using a 2.5 SSD make sure to buy a 3.5 to 2.5 bracket as there is no spot for 2.5. 4:Runs a little warm as most newer processors do but has room for a few fans. 5: Does not support a standard PSU so don't plan to throw any decent graphics card in it without heavy case modding.

So, I want to start by saying I’m not typically a desktop user. In fact, it’s been years since I’ve had a standard desktop tower. In addition to that, I don’t use Windows-based machines on a daily basis. That said, I do have quite a bit of experience with PCs and have owned Dell towers in the past. I thought it might be interesting to try this entry-level Dell compact tower out and see how it compares to machines I use on a daily basis. I’ve always found Dell PCs to be solid machines. They are built well and stand up to standard daily use productivity tasks. They aren’t necessarily built for high-performance gaming or creative studio tasks, but they run email, word processing and spreadsheet applications, and internet browsers well. They are typically great for people who just need a computer for students or practical home use. Unfortunately, this Dell did not live up to that expectation. First of all, the specs on the PC state the processor, memory, and graphics card should be able to handle entry-level processing, basic gaming, and mid-heavy applications. I did not have that experience - at all. I got the tower plugged in appropriately (a display cable is not included, but the machine has a VGA and HDMI port on it for the monitor interface) and pressed the power button. It took approximately 20 minutes to get to the initial setup screen. At that point, Windows walks the user through a few basic start-up steps including entering your Windows user ID, setting your region, and allowing certain permissions. That part of the process only took about 5 minutes to get through. Then, I had to wait. And, wait. And, wait some more. After what seemed like forever, the PC finally showed the home desktop, and even though I could still hear the HD being written to I decided to start by opening the web browser. By default, the internet browser on a Windows 11 machine is Edge. I’ve noticed that Edge can be a little slower than other browsers because it also loads news stories on the front page, but I’ve never experienced anything as I did with this Dell. I couldn’t even type words into the search bar. I would type and then literally about 10 seconds later the letters would start to appear. NOTE: I was using the provided wired Dell keyboard and mouse. I was connected to the internet using our wireless network. We average download speeds of 450 Mbps and upload speeds of 25 Mbps. None of our other computers or devices were having issues so I knew it wasn’t an internet speed issue. I tried to do a few simple navigation tasks but got very frustrated at the computer’s response time so about an hour later, I finally gave up on working with the PC and decided to go to bed. The next morning, I had a little bit clearer head and decided to check the task manager. I thought that maybe there was a large amount of background tasks running. Keep in mind, I was not running any other applications except Task Manager when I looked at the system performance specs. The first time I captured the performance information, the memory usage was showing 4.7/7.7 GB or 61% of the total memory of the machine. CPU usage was at about 10%. I looked at the processes being performed and there were 81 background tasks being performed. I started trying to look through the massive list of background tasks to try and eliminate some of the more intensive ones and that just became too cumbersome. Even though it’s not good to leave your system vulnerable to outside sources, I removed the McAfee applications to see if that would help with some of the system performance. I found that reduced the memory usage from 4.7GB to 3.9GB. It made a difference, but that was still 50% usage with NO APPLICATIONS RUNNING. Next, I ran the Dell SupportAssist diagnostic utility. This app helps to troubleshoot your PC and optimize certain parts of your system. The tests showed that several updates need to be made so I installed those. After that was completed the SupportAssist app was showing that 0.10GB of drive space was reclaimed, 8 updates were installed, and 66 files were optimized. I thought that maybe I would start seeing a change in the performance, but I did not. Before I completed gave up on the machine, I downloaded a few benchmarking apps (Geekbench, NovaBench, and CrystalDiskMark) to run some additional tests, but I used Google Chrome to do it. I still had some lag with Chrome, but it was nowhere near as bad as it was with Edge. I was at least able to type into the search bar. Geekbench: The single-core score was 808 and the multi-core score was 2946. This is about 27% lower than the top 5 average of single-core scores for the Intel Core i3-10105, 4-core processor on Geekbench (average 1098 for single-core score), and the multi-core scores (average was 4066). NovaBench: The average CPU score for the Intel Core i3-10105 with 8GB of RAM on NovaBench is 1016. The score for my Dell after running the NovaBench utility was 1394. CrystalDiskMark had a read/write speed of 179 MB/s and 178.85 MB/s respectively. It’s important to note that these benchmarks really only test the hardware functionality and where it should be operating. I don’t think there is anything wrong with the hardware of the computer. After seeing how many background tasks are running on the machine out of the box, I’m led to believe that it’s more than likely bloatware creeping its ugly head in. As an entry-level machine, I would expect that out of the box the computer would be easy to set up and be running the internet browser at the bare minimum. Unfortunately, this Dell was not capable of doing that. Since this is an ‘entry-level’ machine, you can’t really expect that the average user of this type of computer would go to the trouble I did - or even think to take the steps I did - to try and cure the computer of its slow down issues. The only thing that I think might help is to do a clean install of the operating system and ensure that no unnecessary software packages are included with the setup. At one point, the background tasks did show over 80 tasks. I know that some basic operations of the computer are being completed, but it seems like a lot to be running when no applications (other than Task Manager) are open. I wanted to love this compact PC tower, but the user experience was just awful for me.

This Dell Windows 11 Desktop is hardly large enough to be considered a "tower". It is indeed small and fairly light but comes with a ton of memory and storage. It comes with an optical USB mouse and keyboard (neither of which did I use). The I3 CPU is a little slow in tests compared to it's siblings but I found the performance to be adequate for everyday computing and light gaming. The setup was quite different from that of prior Windows versions and it seemed to take quite a while. The Windows updates took a while, too, but the end result was an interesting looking Windows 11 system - my first exposure to it. It takes a while to get adjusted to this newer version, but I was eventually able to find every needed component. I did notice performance was a bit slower than expected, so I ran comparable benchmarks on my three Windows computers. Higher performance seemed to be in direct relationship to greater CPU power. This PC came out in the 35% range where a higher number indicates better performance. 100% would be BLAZING fast. I believe it would have performed better had it been outfitted with a faster storage drive.

At first I was afraid this was going to be returned. It was slower than slow. However I checked the support app from dell and there were several updates including bios that I installed as well as numerous windows 11 updates. After a couple of hours this machine is moving like it should. I saw other reviews complaining about how slow it is. Check those updates from Dell and run them. I may upgrade the memory to 16 or 32 gb to future proof it. Worth the money. It’s a small tower and runs very quiet and cool.

We were running out of resources on a very old computer-bought this for the name, memory and resources and surprisingly it's faster than it seems. It works better than I had expected. Quick with applications etc.

5-stars based on after upgrades were done. Did a memory upgrade to 16GB then added NVMe M.2 SSD as the system drive. After the upgrades, this desktop can tackle most daily tasks with ease. This is not a gaming desktop though.

First, the Pros: lightweight, compact design that has a HDMI port and a VGA port (another reviewer said there was no VGA but there is), expandable to 64 Gigs of Ram, and has expansion ports. The Cons are mostly software issues that I'll eventually fix. The computer is still a little sluggish at startup, and doesn't seem to shutdown properly. I keep getting a Windows error at startup. Updating the Dell software took a few tries, but the diagnostics does help the performance. Windows11 is annoying. Even if you get rid of the login, you're still constantly connected to Microsoft, which is not comforting and probably related to the computer's sluggishness. The Dell software has annoying notifications either asking to hook your phone up to it, or asking for a restart over and over. But overall, I would buy it again. A great value.

This won’t be a long review, you’ll see why shortly. I’m going to start with a disclaimer for those with a short attention span or who can’t stand reading: This is a bad computer! That’s the nicest way I can put it. OK, on with the details in case you’re still looking at this clunker for some reason. In the box you get the desktop PC standards: the tower, a keyboard, a mouse, a power cable, and your setup and warranty booklets (no monitor and no display cable which has been the case for decades, but in case there’s any doubt I’m mentioning it here). The Dell Inspiron 3891 is a desktop PC on the small-medium side giving you access to a headphone jack, two USB 2.0 ports, a USB-C port, and a USB 3.2 port on the front as well as a DVD-RW drive. On the back of the tower you get an audio output, an HDMI, a serial display port, two USB 3.2 ports, an ethernet port, socket for power cable, and break outs for expansion drives. Inside you have your motherboard, an Intel Core I3, 8gb of RAM (there is a 2nd slot to add more though), and the slots to expand your computer with an M2 SSD or add a graphics card. If you’ve owned a PC in the past ten years you know the setup is a snap, out of the box you plug in your mouse, keyboard, and power cable then hook your monitor cable up to the display port of choice (HDMI for me) and power on. The initial startup and linking to Microsoft took about 15 minutes or a little longer, which struck me as kind of long since much of it was waiting for the next screen to ask for the next bit of info. Everyone knows too that your BEST speeds on a new computer are right out of the box and as the years go by you get more lag and more slow loading of programs, etc. So this is where the negative review for the Dell Inspiron 3891 comes from, my 8 year old family desktop runs far better than this new one right out of the box. I had planned to download some games and see how far you can push this computer, maybe try some photo editing, and I assumed it would do basic office tasks easily. I got none of that because the lag just trying to open Microsoft Edge and download Chrome was MINUTES long! Once I finally got Edge to open I instinctively scrolled the mouse wheel on the opening news page, the page had a literal 10 second delay before it scrolled and the progression down the page was in huge chunks (not smooth like you would expect). I figure I’ve never used Edge before so maybe this is just how that goes (back in the day we never used Internet Explorer either because it was bad….although NOTHING like this). I got to the Chrome download page and again waited a few minutes before the download button would allow me to click it. Download speed was great, hooray for my router! I installed Chrome and opened it up only to be met with another minutes long delay before it opened. I rebooted the PC, maybe an update was waiting to fix this? No, when the computer got back to the desktop it turned the screen white for 30 seconds before loading the desktop proper and again I still had massive, epic, gigantic delays before anything opened. I believe my review is pretty much written despite not getting any games or office productivity tried out….after all I only get a few days to test and post a review from Tech Insider, so a day and a half downloading and opening Steam before I could even TRY to download any games would take up too much time. This is insane and I honestly can’t believe what I’m seeing with this computer! I almost took video to post with this review but it would just be a video of a desktop NOT loading, it would look like a still frame (and have my kids screaming in the background since they won’t go out in the cold to play). I hope it's just a bad system or something and other reviews will be more positive because if Dell puts this out and it's the same for everyone then I think they’ve given up. I applaud the extra ports on the front and the M2 expansion inside but otherwise this is a standard desktop and it doesn’t even run at a pace to keep up with my oldest computer. In short I would strongly urge you to read more reviews and check into this system deeply before you consider buying. Huge thumbs down from me, I do NOT recommend based on my experience.

Exactly what I was looking for after my old win10 suddenly did the black screen of death. I do not like change especially in my PC's but I've always purchased Dell's when needed or been afraid of Cert/Refurb/Open box PC's and this win11 is great. I'm an older amatuer techie, the old that helps all my friends when something goes wrong on their machines lol and this unit was super easy to set up had a basic working machine internet ready machine in an hour. Its fast enough for me, easy to do downloads and change to all my preferences. I'm not a fan of win11 layout so with a simply conversion .exe I'm now looking at a win10 layout without a single hiccup from the system and with 1TB HHD I will never worry about having enough storage space lol. Don't be afraid to purchase its a nice machine with little bloatware.