I'm in college looking for a new, basic computer?

Since you are in college, you will not need a desktop, I guessed that much. For what you want to do, you will need a decent* level for each part. Dell's make good laptops, to an extent. If you're going to buy a laptop get one with about a 2.3 GHz Duo CPU, 3-4 gigs of RAM, a DVD/RW drive, decent sized hard drive, usually 250 Gigs, and a decent video card. What I mean by decent is, it's not cheap, it works great, itll do the job. I would get something bigger than an inspiron 15, I checked out the specs and some parts look small. You're battery is only 4 cell too. But since you can personalize it, I would go with the inspiron 15, as long as you soup it up a bit ^^ I hope i helped you!