Dell Latitude D600 – Mobile Computing Heaven
Written: Jul 30 '04
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Quality of Tech Support: |
 |
|
|
Pros: sturdy, reliable, with great support and warranty
Cons: Power supply could be a little sturdier
The Bottom Line: The Dell business-class machines leave little to be desired. This is a top-notch machine at a good price.
|
|
|
| OpalMan's Full Review: Dell Latitude D600 (D600SAPP) PC Notebook |
We recently purchased a number of laptops for our board of directors and our IS department. We decided to go through Dell since their Business Tech Support seems to be solid and they have good prices on reliable machines. The big question was which laptops to purchase. The board didn’t need fantastic computers, just a reliable, simple to use system that allowed them to access the information they needed. The IS department laptops on the other hand needed to be much more. They had to serve double duty as Disaster Recovery workstations as well as remote connectivity and the rest of our bag of tricks. For the DR aspect, we needed long battery life, for the rest, we needed a decent processor and quality components. For the board we went simple with the Inspiron 1100. The IS department got an education and ended up going with the Latitude D600 with Pentium 4M Centrino chip.
What Exactly is the Centrino Technology?
Centrino technology is a completely new way of processing in a laptop. I asked our representative for suggestions on which laptops have the best battery life and minimal weight. Although we several other models were under consideration, we opted for the Latitude with the Centrino chip. As you may have guessed the M in Pentium 4M is for Mobile. This is a direct result of the Centrino chip. The Centrino chip was designed for mobile laptops. The standard laptop uses the same chip as your average desktop computer. While this computing power is nice, the power consumption is tremendous. While the laptops were getting more powerful, they were getting less useful as you could only use them for shorter and shorter periods of time without plugging in and recharging. Intel made a very wise marketing decision and put some effort into defeating this problem. The Centrino chip was the result. It monitors what you are doing and adjusts its use of system resources accordingly. For instance, if you unplug the laptop and start using the battery, the screen will dim using less power to light the display screen. If you are doing something that involves relatively little processor usage, it will reduce the draw of its own power. According to the information given, the processor will manage power consumption by the various resources when it is on battery in order to maximize battery life. By reducing power consumption of components the user is not using at full capacity, the Centrino chip can extend battery life of these laptops up 5 – 6 hours on a battery that would only power a standard laptop for 2.5 to 3 hours. I have personally used this laptop disconnected from power for 5.5 hours with light to moderate use the entire time and still had approximately 25% left on the battery according to the indicator.
Features
As if the Centrino technology wasn’t enough to make you want to run out and buy one of these, the D600 comes loaded with features. As with most Centrino based laptops this one comes standard with a wireless card. On top of that it came with a 10/100/1000 ethernet adapter. These adapters are getting less and less expensive. They are getting to the point where they are economical enough to put in a desktop or laptop. When connected to the right connection, they can make your file transfers fly! The 40 GB drive is more than enough for most mobile users. It certainly is for everything I have used it for. If its not enough for you, they can upgrade it to as much as 80 GB (of course you will pay for this). Ours came with a special that included the combo-drive DVD/CD-RW. It has proven to be quite reliable and has been a fantastic addition to the laptop as I can move larger files with little difficulty. While the base model comes with just 128 MB of RAM, this is often inadequate. We bought ours with a special offer that doubled the RAM you bought and ended up with 512 MB which has proven to be more than adequate for my needs. One thing I insisted on was getting Win XP Pro with this machine and the model we bought had it included. Since we do quite a bit of remote networking with these systems it was rather important to have this feature as many of the features we need just aren’t there in XP Home. To top all of this off, you can also get an ATI Radeon based graphics chipset included in your laptop. This is an excellent chipset and blows away the Dell Inspirons we got at the same time.
One of the minor features I like is the inclusion of both a touch-pad for the mouse and the little stick in the middle of the keyboard. I love the touch-pad for doing most of my work, but sometimes you need a little more precision than the touch-pad offers. In these cases it is very nice to have the thumb stick to control the mouse rather than having to lug around a full-sized mouse for these rare occasions. While some touch-pads can be overly sensitive or unresponsive, I have had neither problem with mine.
While I am singing the praises of my D600, I can’t forget to mention that there are a couple of negatives too. The first one, and I understand this is becoming standard, is that you have to purchase a floppy drive. They no longer come standard. This was a disappointment as we do still have some floppies floating around. The other negative is the power supply. When it works, it works great. The battery life as has been previously mentioned, is outstanding. The problem is that if the machine does not pick up the power supply as being the specific Dell power supply, it will run on the AC, but it will not charge the battery. It offers to let you go into set up to take care of the problem on bootup, unfortunately there is nothing there to do anything about it.
Customer Service
If you have read my reviews before you know this is a major issue with me. Seeing it has its own heading is usually not a very good sign for the manufacturer of the product I am reviewing. However, with this model Dell actually deserves some credit for their customer service. As noted in my Inspiron review, not all Dell technical support is the same. If you buy a personal or small office machine you get your support from overseas. This support barely speaks English and essentially reads responses off of a knowledge base. My opinion of those Customer Service support numbers is that they should simply give me access to the knowledge base if that is how they are going to handle it. The business class machines get an entirely different technical support number and it is leaps and bounds ahead of what you get on the personal class machines. They answer the phone promptly (no 30 㫔 minute hold times on these lines). They actually know what they are talking about and know the products they support very well. I have never had the feeling that someone was reading off of a script on the rare occasion I have had to call them. I have to congratulate Dell on moving their corporate support back to the US and hiring highly trained knowledgeable personnel to staff it.
The Bottom Line
This Dell rocks! This is the machine the guy in the commercials is very excited that, “Dude, you’re getting a Dell!” The minor inconvenience of having to pay extra for a floppy drive affects fewer and fewer people every day with the proliferation of the USB pen drives. The minor problem with the power supply seems to be isolated to just one of the laptops we have and it could have been caused by a power dip or some other similar problem. Overall, this machine can do everything it has been asked to do and come back for more. If you need a solid, business-class laptop, don’t waste your money on the Inspiron line of laptops. Spend a little extra (okay maybe not so little) and get the quality and reliability of the Latitude line. You will not be disappointed.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1649
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 14 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 31-40
|
|
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.