Dell :: Latitude E4300 First Impressions

Location: Dublin, Ireland
Order Date: 18/09/2008
Estimated Delivery Date (on or before this date): 20/10/2008
Actual Shipment Date: 25/09/2008
Cost: 1461.68 euro (2135.08 usd)

Config:

QTY Item Description
1 Latitude E4300 : BLACK Intel Core 2 DuoSP9300(2.26GHz,1066MHz,6MB) Latitude ON Reader
1 Standard Touchpad 214-10064
1 Display : Black -No Camera, Latitude On Reader, WWAN- 13.3inWXGA(1280x800)
1 Documentation : English Shipping Docs
1 Memory : 4096MB (2x2048) 800MHz DDR3 Dual Channel
1 Hard Drive : 80GB Serial ATA (5400RPM)
1 Optical Drive : Roxio Creator 9.0 Software (XP & VistaCompatible) with Recovery CD
1 Optical Drive : Power DVD 8.0
1 Optical Drive : BLACK 8X DVD+/-RW Drive
1 Power Cord : UK/Ireland 90W AC Adaptor 3-pin
1 Battery : Primary 6-cell 60W/HR LI-ION
1 No Carry Case
1 Wireless : Intel WiFi Link 5100 (802.11 a/b/g/n 1X2) 1/2 MiniCard with Centrino label
1 Keyboard : Internal UK/IR Qwerty Standard Keyboard
1 Software Driver : Latitude E4300
1 Software Driver : Recovery DVD
1 Operating System : English Windows Vista Business SP1 to XP Pro SP3 Downgrade
1 Windows Vista Business SP1 Os media
1 Client Systems Management Disabled
1 AntiVirus : Not Included
1 Base Warranty
1 3Yr Basic Warranty - Next Business Day - Minimum Warranty
1 No Warranty Upgrade
1 Declined CompleteCare
1 Latitude Order - Ireland
1 Road Freight Charge Per Unit 1-10 unit

Collected my dell latitude e4300 saturday morning (27/09) from my local depot instead of waiting for it to be delivered and been giving it a whirl for the last day or so.

First some quick figures. On my kitchen scales the e4300 with the 6 cell battery weighs about 1.8kg (4lbs). The charger and power cord weigh another 500 grams (1lb) making for a total travel weight (notebook + 6 cell battery + charger) of about 2.3 kgs (roughly 5 lbs).

The e4300 feels sturdy enough although the 6 cell battery that sticks out at the back feels a little loose when given a tug. The keyboard (uk layout) as far I can tell is almost same the size/layout as its bigger brother the e6400 except for the page up and down which are full size and placed beside the arrow keys.

When first powered up the machine spends a little over 2 minutes in some kind of bios initialization mode before booting into a windows xp setup screen - subsequent power ons are a lot faster taking about 50 seconds to a bring up a full xp desktop.

The matte display (device manager says LCD2207) is brighter and has better viewing angles than the Latitude D630 I used some months ago but I was expecting a lot more from a LED screen.

Heat wise the notebook gets a little warm under the chassis top left near the air vent where the cpu is located but was still comfortable enough to place on my lap while wearing jeans.

Noise is a problem with this notebook. The cpu fan although not loud is audible if you're in a quiet room. The latitude D630 was almost whisper quiet in comparison. There's also a slight electronic buzz which sounds like someone sending morse code coming from the top left of the notebook which becomes extremely irritating after a while.

The battery meter claims over 6 hours when fully charged but I've gotten nearer 5 with wifi and some web browsing - will do more formal tests later.

The default software install on this machine is a mess - see attached screenshots taken from task manager and process explorer.

On booting into Windows xp over 354 mb of ram is already being used up by running processes all seemingly related to the proper functioning of this laptop. I though vista memory usage was excessive but for an xp install this is ridiculous - if only 512Meg ram was installed this machine would not be usable as a business notebook.

In general use the touchpad becomes intermittingly laggy with the mouse pointer pausing to change shape (2 black arrows,twirl) no doubt due to some value add cruft running in the background and the touchpad has twice stopped responding to finger input necessitating a windows reboot.

The bottom right of the keyboard doesn't seem to fit snuggly with the notebooks chassis leading to a noticeable flex everytime you press the page down or right arrow key.

Theres an ambient light sensor that adjusts the screen brightness on the fly depending on lighting conditions but anytime I enable it the display brightness seem to jump about a lot (even indoors at night) so I left it off.

With wireless configuration there also appears to be some kind of bun fight between windows xp,dells control point and Intel PROSet software with the apparent winner being Intel.

Not sure if there's also a problem with whatever tracks hard disk usage on this notebook as the hard disk light on the bezel is constantly flashing even when filemon.exe utility reports no file activity.

I'm going do some more tests and try and find out if I can do something about the buzzing noise, hard disk light and keyboard flex but as it stands for the price I paid this notebook is failing to impress.