Latitude E-Series Anticipation Thread

Very nice find! thanks for posting.

 

The 6th character in that string is the configuration number. "f" is base, "g" is the next up, and "h" is the "best". I imagine this is what you see after you click on a model and it gives you a few different base configs to chose from.

EDIT: wrote a small program to check all combinations of the last two letters, appears 'f', 'g', and 'h' are the only valid ones, and 'p' is the only valid end character. I'm slightly nervous about doing more thorough searches, as they might consider this a DoS attack, although I doubt my one little machine is capable of doing such, as the app is not threaded (yet).

 

Good job! Now can you use your little program to find other, unannounced laptops? I'd love to get info on the new Precisions and the Montevina-based consumer laptops.

 

You know, I walked away from that program for a little while, and cleaned up around the house some...oddly enough, when I sat back down at the computer, I found myself looking up how to thread in C#

Is there anything I need to know about these "numbers"? Any character that are always the same?

 

What are the expected prices?

 

This is what I have so far:

blcwcfp – E5400 – $839
blcwcgp – E5400 – $1094
blcwchp – E5400 – $1460

blcwdfp – E5500 – $859
blcwdgp – E5500 – $1223
blcwdhp – E5500 – $1480

blcwefp – E6400 – $1139
blcwegp – E6400 – $1324
blcwehp – E6400 – $1482

blcwffp – E6500 – $1169
blcwfgp – E6500 – $1354
blcwfhp – E6500 – $1512

 

If the configuration pages on dell.com are correct, then it is a bad typo. Let's just hope there is actually a DDR3 option -- *crosses fingers* and it should be noted that these computers can last YEARS... so even if the latency may be higher on current DDR3, (and I believe the poster noting that it is deceptive), it is ridiculous to not have a machine be able to upgrade when the "better" ram comes out. Putting a ddr2 slot into it is dooming it to quick obsoleteness.

 

The units I have seen all had ddr3 1066. Its either a typo or a cruel last second change

 

Can we say Precision? All together now: Precision

M4400 ($1569)
M4400 32bit ($1834)

M2400 ($1449)
M2400 ($1794)

I also found these desktops, for what it is worth:
T7400
T5400
T3400

EDIT: Alright, I finished analyzing my data, and the above laptops is what I found. Dell probably hates me right now for this, but here is what I did. Each dell system configuration has a 7 character code that identifies it. The codes are garbage, as far as I can tell, but they do follow this pattern on the business side:

Latitudes start with "blcw???"
XPSes start with "bycw???"
Latitudes start with "bwdw???"

The trick is knowing the last three characters. Usually one character determines the model, another the configuration, and the third is random, but consistent. For fear that Dell would not conform to the appeared "standard", I wrote a brute force application. The application tried all letters [a-z] and numbers [0-9] in all three places for each form above. Processing the data was simple. If the code works, the header you get back has config.aspx [*1] in it, otherwise it goes to an error page. Using a little threading, I was able to knock out this job in ~4 hours and have a page worth of valid links to check. The Latitudes popped up all known links, so nothing new for us to see. The Precisions were iffy, as I'm not familiar with their numbering scheme and somehow desktops got thrown in with them. Any Precision that was M?400, I considered new. Everything else was M?300. Finally, the XPSes were disappointing--there were no new links. Let me stress that this is on the Small Business side of Dell, so there may be pages on the Home side.

*1 - Sometimes you get taken to a survey page. My program did NOT take into account for this. My logic is that out of all the valid request, the chances of hitting a survey twice in a row for the same laptop (which would mask the laptop) would most likely not happen. Plus I'm lazy and didn't want to figure out the logic, as sometimes the survey appears on invalid pages.

 

Wow, that is quite the motherload of Precision info. Good job!

The base configurations are quite expensive for what's on offer, and upgrades quickly inflate the cost.