Dell Latitude E4200 Info

Thanks for the feedback, glad to help.

Colin

 

Thanks for the review Colin

Would you be kind enough to make some more comments the fan noise?
You said "neither too noisy or obtrusive" although some others owners have reported differently.

Could you help to quantify it; is it high or low pitch, approximate percentage of time it is active (say, browsing over WLAN)

I'd also be keen to hear some stat's about that 6-cell battery, especially after a few more charge/discharge cycles..

Thanks again for filling in some of the blanks about this machine!

 

Hi Withnail

I have used a fair few dells and the fan on my e4200 is probably the least annoying of any recent dell I have used.

It does kick in from time to time but as I said I haven’t found it to be distracting or overly annoying.

I spend a good couple of hours installing stuff this evening and again I was impressed and how the thermal issues were dealt with.

I could best describe it as fan like hum, you can hear it for sure. But not high pitch or anything.

As for time active say about 1 minute for every 5 or something like that when I was installing stuff. Ill pay more attention next time.

Ill let you know how i get on with the battery.

Colin

 

I am still looking for some data on the performance difference between the Mobility SSD and the Ultra Performance SSD. Like usual the Dell phone sales team was fairly useless but one of the guys I talked with said that the Ultra Performance SSD drained the battery much quicker than the Mobility SSD. Is this true? It does not make sense to me but does this make sense to anybody else?

Any feedback, thoughts or views would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!

 

That battery drain theory makes very little sense to me. Oh sure, there are differences in the MLC and SLC chips used with (likely) different power draws but the impact on the battery life is or should be minimal.

I would never buy a 128GB MLC SSD unless 1) It is the Intel X25 or 2) It is less than $250 (if it isn't the Intel). The risk and (stuttering) performance issues are simply not worth anything higher than that. Also, I would not use a MLC SSD in a corporate-focused machine like the E4200. It would be great for a netbook though. If you need to know more, I think I linked to the SSD thread earlier here but it's a sticky in the 'Aftermarket Upgrades' section. You can read the last ten pages to get the low-down on cheap MLC SSDs, like the OCZ Core v.2 et al.

The Samsung 64GB SLC Ultra SSD is the one to get unless your storage needs are so great that you just can't do without the 128GB capacity.

 

Thanks for the info and look forward to hearing how it goes!

 

Colins photo here convinced me not to get a smaller 9" netbook, I have an XPS m1330 and the E4200 definitely seems compact enough

 

Yes, the E4200 is amazingly light. Of course, it's also a wee bit more expensive than most netbooks
BTW, thanks Colin, great review.

 

I have m1330 in hand as well and it is definitely overweight. I'm waiting for e4200 to be delivered.

 

Corporate, did you cave in and order one without the backlit keyboard and LatON? I recall this was what you were waiting for?