An ode to my E6230

Thought I'd drop into the E6230 Owner's thread to sing the praises of this wonderful model of laptop, but oddly it seems to be in lockdown, so will post here instead. Hope this is ok?

I'd already been using an E6430 since 2013, and picked up a cheap E6230 in 2019 to have as a spare and to do stuff that needs win 10.

The refurb E6230 I got off one of the local online marketplaces for SGD 180 came with 4 gb of unbranded ram and a 512 GB 'hybrid' hard disk. It was probably an off-lease from a corporate fleet. It has an i7 and was in top notch condition when I got it. I suspect it was only ever used by a little old lady who took it out on Sunday's to do the occasional powerpoint or something. Well, I've certainly added considerable wear and tear since then, but this machine is a trooper!

Of course I quickly ditched the 4 gb ram stick (the machine is next to useless with 4) and stuck in 16gb of Crucial Ram (SGD 99) and swapped out the hdd for a 512 GB Sata III Samsung SSD 860 EVO (SGD 129 iirc). The machine was nice on 16 GB RAM, and then going to the SSD made it even sweeter. I've recently been doing some work that kept filling up my space so swapped again to a 1 TB Samsung 870 EVO (SGD 229). Speedwise no difference noticed, but nice to have more space.

Wear and tear having caught up with my E6430, the E6230 has been my daily driver for the last year or two now. I recently picked up a new Precision 7540 but am actually still using this 6230 most of the time, at least for now.

I just love the ergonomics on it. The keyboard is non-backlit, and though it looks identical to the backlit keyboard on my E6430 it feels a little different. Seems like it has a tiny bit more travel? Its certainly great to hammer away on. In my opinion, both these machines have nicer keyboards than the keyboard on my Precision 7540 but neither are quite as nice as the keyboard I had on my Vostro 1400 (a model from 2008).

The Alps touchpad on the 6230 is the nicest I've ever used. Better than the precision touchpad on the Precision. I think same hardware as the 6430, but maybe the driver or my settings are better. It feels like an extension of my arm, like the pointer and me are a gestalt entity.

A cool thing is that I managed to get both two finger and single finger scroll working at the same time! (I had to muck about a bit using two versions of the Dell Touchpad application and a little registry tweaking). So I have the two finger doing fast scrolling and the single finger doing more precise scrolling. Sadly touchpad scrolling in windows 10 still has a lot of issues in various applications compared to Windows 7. Seems this is mostly Windows 10's fault rather than the driver though - my Precision 7540 has a lot of the same issues. Oh well. Despite that, this is still the bestest touchpad ever. Size and position relative to the keyboard is also just nice on the 6230 (my 6430 is dual pointing so it's touchpad is about 1/2" further from the space bar there).

I also like that despite being the smallest of the E6x30 lineup it still got dedicated mute and volume keys. (In contrast, despite vast acres of space to put them, my 15" Precision 7540 doesn't have that. Not impressed!) This machine also has two USB 3 A and one USB 2 A slots - though here its age is showing now - they are all a bit loose and will disconnect on a touch.

Where this machine doesn't shine is the display. At least it is matte and not glossy, but beyond that little nice can be said of it. 1366 x 768 is terrible for things like Visual Studio. (Does anyone know if there are other higher res panels released since that could be put in instead?)

Mostly I'm working at home of late, so I plug into a good quality 24" 1080p HDMI display that I mount on a monitor arm a foot behind the laptop so that it's right in my line of sight and at a good focus distance for my aging eyes. The smaller height of the E6230 screen means I don't need to elevate the external monitor too high. So I use that for the main work area and the laptop screen for whatever I'm referring to and it's a comfortable setup. The VGA port and compatibility with my old Vostro's 90 watt adapter is convenient when I take it to the other room and use it with an ancient monitor I have in there.

From an aesthetic viewpoint, I'm rather keen on how the extended batteries on the E6x30 series look sticking out the back. Despite being an engineering workaround it's a really neat and unique style that other laptops don't have. Rather like how that bump on 747s made them look cool too.

All in all, despite being almost a decade old this machine is still almost sort-of maybe up there with recent low end machines in performance. Well, ok ,ok, I mean if you turn the lights right down and squint at it from a funny angle: eg: google i7-3520 vs i3-1115G4. lol. But it certainly looks much cooler than modern machines, and has much much much nicer ergonomics (apart from it's display of which the less said the better).

Visual Studio is a bit klunky because VS is a terrible CPU-hog, but VS Code, Eclipse, YouTube & NetFlix at 1080p, MS Office are all smooth as butter on this machine - and that's with 2 browsers and heaps of tabs open in each, IIS, 3 instances of SQL Server all going in the background. So its still great workhorse.

For someone on a budget looking for a tidy little machine for work or uni this model is absolutely still worth a look if got lobang to acquire one in good nick - although do bear in mind that batteries and their replacement are a fly in the ointment for older machines.

 

The 6230 was a lovely little compact machine, and for a full-power (non-ULV CPU) had surprisingly good battery life - plus it could take the 6-cell slice on the underside. I don't know if anyone makes a 3rd party clone of that, but it might be worth getting if they do - IIRC Dell hasn't produced them in years, and they were kind of absurdly priced if you didn't have a corporate discount.

I don't think I could tolerate going back to dual cores now that there are comparably small quads, but if your uses still perform adequately on it it's a great machine.

I had one for a couple of years, but then gave it to my brother once it started feeling too slow to use as my main travel machine. The E72x0 up to the 7290 aren't bad replacements, but it's kind of a bummer that there isn't a traditional subnotebook below 13" anymore (although I'd be curious how the 5320/7320 compare in dimensions to the the E6230.)