Dell Latitude D620

The Dell Latitude D620 has a spec that means you are booting, starting up and processing about as fast as you could possibly need. At the end of the day, if a machine can do that task reliably, then that's the basic job done - that's what computers are for.

Anything more aesthetic is largely irrelevant and when you consider the entire hardware industry has become so cut-throat that the stuff itself is just really mass-market commodities rather than pieces of engineering, there's little uniqueness in anything to speak of. Frankly the more standardised these units get the better it is for Joe Public.

So the Dell D620 does what one expects and does it well. OK the 'bigger' screen isn't the world's finest, but I simply paid another 80 quid and got a very good (HP as it happened) LCD monitor, which you'd be mad not to have at those prices.

The OS (I opted to avoid Vista, so far) seems to live quite happily on the machine, no teething troubles, little set up concerns. A huge hard disk and a pretty nice unit to boot, it seems very good value and - I'd hope - should be just the thing for the next couple of years, by which time Microsoft and Intel will have contrived to make all this kit redundant by moving ever onwards and upwards in terms of performance requirements (on the part of Windows) and power (on the part of intel). Such is the way.

The screen is a real disapointment. This Dell Latitude D620 unit has the WXGA+ (1440x900) screen. The grainy background makes the screen look out of focus. I've tried changing all the setting under the sun (dpi, native resolution etc) This problem appears to be property of the physical screen.

Far better than D600 that was replaced with the D620.

The Dell customer support is still extremely poor, I contacted them to make sure I could use the Docking station we have for the D600 with the D620 and was passed around 6 different people. It took me over an hour to find out it could be used. I gave up trying to get the D600 fixed even though it has 3 years warranty because they messed me around so much.

Wouldn't recommend it because of my previous problems with Dell laptops, have had a 9100 which went pop 3 times and took 2 weeks to fix each time, the D600 which is falling apart even though it was treated well. D620 looks much better but if we have a problem the technical support is awful and removes all the good points ten fold! Before you think why I bought another Dell - we had to, we have a specialist PCI card in the laptops docking station and the company that supplied the card only supports Dell products.