Dell Latitude E4200

After several years of relying on a pair of Dell L400 laptops, it became apparent that their lack of up-to-date connectivity coupled with a rather delicate power connection was going to force an upgrade. The E4200 Latitude was the choice as a replacement. I've had it for about 5 months so far and am generally pleased with it. It's very light and portable and build quality is excellent. Battery life averages around 2 - 2.5 hours and the computer runs pretty cool. The power connector is considerably more robust than the L400's; the supplied power adaptor is also noticeably larger, which means that it too runs cooler and is therefore more reliable, although it does detract a bit from the portability of the whole system. The speed and silence of the solid-state drive is very welcome. Wireless connectivity seems a bit flaky at times (doesn't always connect to the default profile instantly), but range is as good as can be expected. Bluetooth connectivity works well with my mobile, which is all I've used it with.

The LED-backed widescreen display is bright, clear and comfortable to view with a wide viewing angle, although the ambient light sensor is worthless and on my machine stays permanently disabled; if it is on, the screen brightness never stays constant for more than a few seconds, which is very distracting. This unit was bought refurbished from NDC in Manchester and the reason for it having been refurbished early became clear after a while; the display developed an intermittent connection fault which would corrupt the left hand quarter of the screen. When this became unbearable it was sent back to NDC for repair under warranty. They did this successfully, no quibbles, and turned it around in less than seven days just before Christmas. Compare this with some of the horror stories we have heard about Dell's own tech support! On the strength of this, I would strongly recommend NDC as a supplier of Dell PCs: you can get a good-as-new machine anything from a few months to a few years old, with a one year warranty which works, all this and still have it loaded with XP too. Note that NDC don't yet supply Windows 7 on their refurbished machines as standard (although you can have it as an option) on the grounds that "it's too new to be sure of its reliability"!

One minor quibble about the E4200, when comparing it with the old L400, is that the front corners of the case are that much closer to the keyboard as a result of the widescreen form factor, so that your palms rest on them when doing a lot of typing; and they're sharper, and hence more uncomfortable. But the Dell keyboard itself is a gem, as always. The small size and weight mean that there is no optical drive and few ports, but provided you have other computers to network it with this is no real disadvantage. All in all, a recommended unit.

Having had a really terrible Sony Vaio micro laptop I was quite keen to still get a laptop which was small and portable, but one that did not suffer from 'the speed of a snail syndrome'.

The Dell Latitude E4200 is pretty good overall, but it does have its faults. The screen isnt particularly brilliant for example, its a little bit darker than most screens which is quite annoying.

The big drawback in terms of specs is the hard drive - it has 80gb, which by todays standards is pretty small. I managed to fill it up in 3 days, so have since had to archieve a load of stuff to a separate external hard drive.

Overall though it looks quite nice (went for red casing - contraversial!) and the price wasn't too bad for a small ultraportable laptop