Dell Latitude E4200 Info

Hehe, right on, Niterider Well, since we are talking about advertising, I am sure many have seen the MBA vs E4200 ad here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGv3DI456E

That manila envelope looks just about ready to burst at the seams!

 

When I first saw that ad, I did not think it was at all flattering to Dell. The E4200 looks decidedly clunky next to that Macbook Air.

 

DHL recovered (for once). Weights (as per my postal scale, +/- 0.005 lbs):

E4200 (no battery) - 1.805 lbs
4-cell Battery - 0.450 lbs
E4200 + 4-cell - 2.255 lbs
AC Adapter + Cord - 0.515 lbs
DVD+/-RW + Cord - 0.745 lbs
Media Bay Case - 0.230 lbs
Leather Folio - 0.905 lbs

The E4200 I ordered has an extra stick of RAM, BT, the 5300 wireless, and the fingerprint reader, so it would weigh slightly more than a stripped config. In any case, Dell's reported weight of 2.2lbs is pretty much dead on.

 

You're the man! Alright!!!! Thank you. Do give us a review when you are done playing

 

Alright, I started playing with my E4200 about an hour ago. Thus far I'm not impressed.

1. The screen is too blue by default and requires some adjustment in the Intel control panel applet (-3 or so on the blue contrast seems to "fix" it).
2. The fan is noisy as hell.
3. THe screen seems to go to 100% brightness on AC, regardless of what I set in the BIOS.
4. Latitude ON seems to be missing from my system. I uninstalled and reinstalled the reader software as it told me to but it still claims it's not activated. I opened the bottom panel on the notebook and the little card is missing. I've got to talk to my rep on Monday about this because it really seems like I'm missing some necessary hardware here...

On the plus side, it is surprisingly quick for what it is. The Ultra Performance SSD is really amazing and does a great job of covering up the fact that this thing is only packing a 1.4GHz dual core CPU.

Anyway, more later...

 

Right click on the power icon in the taskbar and click "Power Options".

Then select the power plan you are using and adjust the settings. You can change the default brightness there.

Greg

 

Awww man, that sucks! A common theme seems to have emerged with all the new E4200 owners. They aren't blown away so to speak. That fan is a real problem. The 1.4DC SU9400 is supposed to be 45nm and not generate as much heat. I have the 1.2 Merom in my D430 and the fan barely turns on even when I visiting sites using heavy flash. Could be a bad design decision in the internals. Looks like the early adopters suffer--not sure how much beta testing was done on these units. Another thing that appears to be making the rounds in the Sammy SLC drive in the E4200--looks like it's a real blazer. It's the 1.8" 'super' low-profile variant and I can't seem to tell which model it is. It may just be the third gen SLC (I have first gen in my M1330) and the current shipping XPS/Latitudes are using the second gen units that started shipping sometime in May, I think.

 

Hi,

There shouldn't be any card. You purchased Latitude On Reader, which is software solution only. Dell didn't introduced full hardware Latitude On yet.

Look for explanation here : http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=304528&page=7 - my (7th or so) post.

cheers

K.

 

So the settings in the BIOS are worthless then. Strange, all my other Vista notebooks (including other Dells) honor the BIOS settings. Anyway, thanks for this tip.

The SSD in mine is listed in Device Manager as "Samsung SSD Thin uSATA 6". It's an absolute monster and really makes up for the relatively slow processor in the system. Doing every day work this is faster than my Optiplex 755 with a Q9550 (quad-core, 2.83GHz), 8GB of RAM, and a 160GB 10K RPM Raptor.

Well, missing hardware aside, it doesn't seem to work. I try an launch it and it tells me it's not activated and to run the setup file after booting. I did that and it still didn't work. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling and that didn't help either.

 

Just looked into Latitude On Reader a bit more and it looks like all it does is let you read your Outlook 2003/2007 email, view your contacts, and view your calendar. If you don't use Outlook then it's completely useless until the full version comes out.