GREAT laptop
Written: Dec 02 '00
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Pros: hardware, support, features, compatibility
Cons: touchpad sensitivity
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| majorowl's Full Review: Dell Latitude CPx |
I've had one of these CPx's since last September (it's assigned to me by my work). Anyway, it's a great laptop. I've always been a pretty big fan of Dell from a business standpoint (they take care of you); but these Latitudes take the cake.
Their hardware support is excellent. Dell Latitudes are expressly designed to have good, stock hardware that can be swapped between models (so long as they're all Latitudes, you can share CDROM drives and other components). The hardware is good enough that I've got Red Hat Linux 6.2 coexisting happily with Windows 2000 Professional.
Dell chose a stock ATI Rage Pro driver to power the graphics, with an *adequate* 8 megabytes of video ram. That's a good amount for a laptop display, and I've satisfactorily run Civilization Call To Power and Unreal Tournament on this puppy (though I prefer to connect the laptop to a nice CRT if I'm playing games). Also, with respect to the video of the Latitude, you may notice an annoying thing vertical line down the middle of the screen when you're running Linux. There's some issue with the Rage Pro Mobility chipset (nothing that makes it unusable, just mildly annoying). Red Hat 6.2 comes with XFree86 3.3.6, I believe, so it's worth paying attention to updates to the XFree86 project. In fact, I hear Red Hat 7 (which comes with XFree86 3.4) clears up this minor nuisance. Lastly on graphics, the display screen is GREAT. Big, bright, and a good refresh rate. It's better than some 15" CRT monitors I have at home!
The rest of the components are great, 128 MB of RAM (the bare minimum, in my opinion, for Win2K), 11 gig hard drive, and a PIII running at 650 MHz (with an adorable, and no doubt necessary, jet intake fan built into the side rear corner to cool the chip). I wish Dell gave a choice between Intel and AMD chips, but that's another issue altogether.
There are lots of other little features that I find very nifty. The Latitudes have both touchpads and the 'pencil eraser' pointing devices. My one big con is the annoying sensitivity of the touchpad. When you have your hands resting in front of the keyboard to type, you sometimes find your cursor jump because the edge base of your thumb hits the pad, making it effect a click. It also has a single PS2 port in the back that you can plug either a mouse or keyboard into. I choose a mouse because the built-in keyboard is really quite excellent for a laptop and b/c I set the BIOS to disable the touchpad/pencil-eraser combination when a mouse is detected. there's also a video-out port in the rear to hook up a monitor. I find these options very convenient because you can essentially have a poor man's docking station by hooking up a mouse and monitor. However, I must add that the Dell Latitude docking stations are great. They come with integrated 10/100 network interfaces and plenty of ports. One high-end docking station model comes with integrated SCSI!
Finally, I end with a tip of the hat to Dell for their support. You can plug in the unique service tag of your computer at their website, and it'll give you a nifty page that has driver updates, a listing of everything your machine originally shipped with, hardware and software, and it provides troubleshooting tips.
These are really great laptops, I especially recommend them to businesses because of Dell's great support and the inter-compatibility between the models.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 3200
Operating System: Linux
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 601-700
Screen Size: 14"
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: CD-ROM
Hard Drive (GB): 9-12
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Epinions.com ID:
majorowl
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Member: Matt
Location: Springfield, Virginia
Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 1 member
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