E6420 vs E5420 photo comparison

I have my own E6420 (corei5, nvidia, 1600x900 screen), and an E5420 was just bought at work (corei5, intel graphics, 1600x900 screen), so I thought people might like a visual comparison.

LatitudePr0n - a set on Flickr

 

Nice comparison.

They don't look that much different.

 

the differences initially seem quite subtle, but when you handle them you realise the the E6420 is much more robust with the metal frame.

I think with a small bang on a corner the E6420 would survive better, the E54 might crack being plastic. OTOH, a heavy drop of the E6420 onto a corner and there'd be more risk of the shock damaging internals, whereas the E5420 might crack but absorb the shock better?

 

I swapped my old work laptop, an E6510, with the new E5420 because it's so much lighter, more powerful with encrypted disk.

I installed linux on the E5420 and discovered that whilst my E6420 has an Intel wifi adaptor and was supported out of the box, the E5420 has a Broadcom wifi adaptor and I had jump through a few hoops.

I was able to get the requisite kernel modules for opensuse 12.1-x86-64 from the packman repository.

I don't know if the Broadcom adaptor is the default, or whether it was simply what was the cheapest when the laptop was bought by our purchasing department.

I am tempted to swap the wifi adaptor over with my previous laptop, which has a regular Intel adaptor as it's so much less hassle!

 

I did that, it was an easy swap removing the miniPCIe adaptor from the E6510 and swapping it with the broadcom one in the E5420.

Now I don't have to worry about doing a linux update, getting a new kernel and wifi breaking.

 

I added some pictures of an E6530. There model is indistinguishable from an E6520, so far as I can see.