Latitude E4300 first impressions

duschnouk :

Thanks for this excellent review ! I am pleased to see that this notebook is not so bad as i read elsewhere on this forum (and others).

Just one thing : what about the noise of the fan AND the hard disk?

 

I have the E4300 and a docking station with it. Let me post a quick review:

The laptop is very slim and light, build quality is solid. Styling is gorgeous as always with Dell.

The speakers are absolutely HORRID.

The first E4300 I received had a bad bluetooth module on it and Dell could not fix this so they sent me a brand new E4300. I'm not even going to go into detail about how bad their hardware repair was (worst Dell repair experience ever).

Now that I have my second one this one seems to behave a lot better. When I first got it the wireless seemed to be quirky like I would appear connected to the my wireless AP but I would get no Internet. I had to turn off the wireless with the wireless switch and turn it back on for my wireless to reconnect because I could not manually disable it from Windows.

Also my laptop would randomly freeze when playing videos and certain wav files would skip (for example when shutting down windows or starting it up).

I have updated the BIOS, Wireless drivers and Video/Sound drivers and the Laptop has been behaving great ever since.

The speakers are still horrible though.

Resolution could be better.

No glossy screen!! Get with the program Dell!

In regards to the docking station it has display port not HDMI.

Latitude ON is a joke until Dell makes it able to reply to emails, and browse the web with wireless. It could also be sped up.

Would I buy the Laptop again? Yes. It's a great lightweight laptop that has great performance.

My batter gets about 4 hours per charge. Overall I'm happy with it and I'd rather be on a Dell than a Lenovo.

 

GoodBytes > calm down ... I agree that the speakers are really bad in comparsion with usual speakers you can find in notebooks.
Screen is gorgeous, what I was quite disappointed was web cam. I can compare only to MacBook that I had before and the Dell webcam image quality is really bad.

 

I Agree regard sound speakers, that (at max volume) are affected by crackling and distortion.
However i disagree regard the webcam, which detects image and videos very smoothly with not-so-bad image quality (with enough illumination obviously).

After more than a week of usage (carring it back and forth by train every day, using only the neoprene sleeve provided - free - by dell) I can say this notebook is lightweight, solid enough to resists to daily mistreatment, the battery life with misc usage reach 5,5 hours (i mean software installation in high performance, office task with vista power save mode, waching 1080p trailers in high performance,surfing the web with wifi on all the time).The backlight keyboard worth every cents I've spent for it!

The cons are:
- the weakest part of the notebook is the screen frame i think, which in the bottom part (where there is the Dell logo) is not fixed at all; i don't know if it is intentionally or dell fault, but it's not a threat at the solidity of the machine.
- this machine (especially the keyboard) is a finger print collector!
- it's all well assembled, however this notebook is composed by many many parts, that makes me worry and regret the unibody lid of the macbooks (there isn't any hits of problems until now! )
- speakers, but we know it's not a real cons in this type of notebook

Now I got a Kensington contour active notebook bag (horizontal), which is not bad (not the built quality i hope, but it's fine) and the microsoft arc mouse, which is really really GREAT and i recommend it because of it's design, size, quality and easy of usage.

Simone

 

I just released my full review on http://zoryfl.wmw.cc - you're welcome to read, comment and criticize it!

 

Quality of assebly depends on piece maybe. My was incredible terrible - you can photo links. I can confirm screen frame: not fixed in some parts, moves. There is a small not uniform gap between this frame and display. The same the upper frame of keyboard: if you want to press small buttons, the first movement is about the frame and keybord (about 1 mm), only then the button switches.

 

Some posts have been deleted.

Please stop trolling and respect each member's opinion. Insulting won't be tolerated.
Thank you.

 

What I have to say is that I am a bit surprised of what some people are saying here about the noise of the fan and hard disk.
If I have to compare with the previous Latitude Dxxx series or with a tiny computer like an Averatec 1050 (10.6''), is:
- Regarding the drive noise: much more quiet than in my previous Dell. The one of my E4300 is a 250Gb 7200rpm (seagate), and in my D810 it was a 7200rpm 60Gb. If I compare with a 80Gb 4200rpm of the Averatec of my wife, it is even more better... So really, this IS quiet. Compare with others laptop hard drive and you will see. But what is sure is that hard drive are now very cheap, i have seen my 250Gb 7200rpm sold for 75€ in computer shops in Paris
- Fan noise: much quieter than in the D810 or in a Averatec 1050. The left air exit seems to really work here and flush all the hot air quickly. Previous Dxxx series experienced more warm problem as all aeration was made in the bottom, which is not a good idea if you have to put your laptop in a surface which is not smooth (such as plastic, rubber or fabric). As a result the laptop is warm, as all laptop, but not hot.

Regarding SSD drives, I remember to have red an article (I lost the reference, I will try to find it again) which was very critic on them, telling that their performance are not so good, especially when it comes to the reading and writing of very small files (which all OS like to do) - and that only the last generation of very fast drives (like the very expensive one proposed for the E4200 which is obviously a Samsung) were able to overpass. This was a key element of my choice to keep E4300 vs E4200.

 

Agreed. Of the dozen or notebooks around our family and work it is probably the quietest. We have the 80GB drives in our 2.

 

I still am irritated by the continuous (every 0.5-1 sec) disk access causing LED flicker and disk ticking. Dell have now informed me this is normal with the Seagate 160GB drive with freefall issued with this machine and they will not replace drive and that reinstall will not help. Does anyone have the E4300 with a Seagate 160GB without this problem.

I have also had frequent BSOD crashes indicating a Intel Matyrix storage issue. Intell have analysed the minidumps and indicate a potential issue with initial drive configuration and SMART monitoring and one should contact Dell to resolve. Im still hoping that Dell will find a way to configure the drive so that it is not "normal with this machine"

I have previously had C300 and D400 latitudes and find that generally the E4300 is a logical progression. Size and weight are more but the bigger screen and greater punch in power probably cancel this out. I would have preferred one more USB and a removable DVD drive unit (to reduce weight).