Latitude e7440 vs e6430u

Be aware that the 7440 and 7420 do not have VGA ports. Could be a big deal to some people. The have mDP and HDMI iirc.

The keyboard is not as good as the 6000 series but overall the 7440 and 7420 are nice notebooks.

 

battery life continues to be excellent. I scored an upgrade to a backlit keyboard, because mine had the problems with the smelly plastics.

I also implanted a 1TB hard drive (7mm slim SD blue) into the 2.5" bay, cost £13-ish for the special sata cable, and quite a few hours work shortening the cable that spanned the bay and was overly long and bowed up and stopped the drive fitting. That has shortened battery life a bit.

 

I finally found the panel type, I had to boot windows, dmidecode didn't really offer me anything obvious in linux.

It's Device Manager -> Monitor -> device properties -> Hardware IDs = Monitor\LGD03EA

and looking up LGD03EA shows that it's one of two panel types used, the other is an Optronics AUO113D. The same panels are also discussed in forums covering an Alienware laptop.

 

if you want casual gaming, the HD graphics seem fine, for example, I can play Minecraft OK without obvious problems, though I did dial back fancy graphics options a little.

 

This E7440 is a very likable Latitude with Full HD matte, Dual-Memory slot, mSata and HDD option, I wonder can it take 9mm or only 7mm thick? It is also looking alright finally, because after the E6410 series all newer looking shít out. The only thing what I'm missing is the discrete GPU, hope the next generation will receive the very efficient 840M or 845M Maxwell GPU.

 

You can only fit a 2.5" SATA drive if it's 7mm or thinner, and the space isn't occupied by the ssd connected to the "interposer" because the miniPCIe/mSATA slot is occupied by the 3G/WWAN card.
Even then you might have problems if the cable that crosses the bay is too long and bows up; mine did and I to strip my Dell the bone and shorten the cable.

 

speculatrix, thanks for the lcd panel details, I consider the opportunity to buy a model with HD resolution (1368x768) and then replace to one of these IPS, it seems it's possible.

 

the * icon on the left and bottom of a post is a good way to vote it up ;-)

I would say to go for the 1080p panel straight off, it'll be a royal PITA to switch the panel and you'll invalidate any warranty, which on the Dells is quite good, here in the UK at least you get three years on the laptop and a dead/stuck pixel warranty on the display.

 

I second that. Since Dec that I got this laptop, it has been my main pc at home, work and while traveling and it hasn't disappointed me a bit (well, aside the well-known driver issues of intel AC7260 wireless card).
The largest drive you can fit in the 2.5" bay is 7mm, but I had a 9mm intel 330 and I managed to fit it by removing one half of the metal casing of the drive with no problem.