D420 and 430 slow performance thoughts

So I work in IT, and have supported hundreds of D420 and D430 laptops. One very common denominator is extremely slow performance. Almost all of these laptops have hard drives that eventually fail, while half of those also have cooling fans that fail.

Other than the cooling issue, is there any other problems or bottlenecks in the design of this laptop to hinder performance? I'm thinking the 1.8" hard drive could also have something to do with it.

 

I'm sure that the 1.8" HDD has a lot to do with the performance limitations but also make sure that the RAM is at the maximum supported by the platform. Ideally, you should put in SSDs. However, the choice of suitable SSDs is relatively limited.

John

 

These systems are ultra-portable systems dating back to 2006 and 2007 respectivly. They use Ultra low voltage processors and 1.8" mechanical hard drives. These systems were designed for portability not performance. You could try an SSD as I'm sure that would help performance but an 1.8" PATA SSD can be expensive. I would also expect fan and hard drive failures on 3-4 year old systems that are used 6-8 hours daily.

 

The 12 inch Latitude ULV CPU laptops are consistently failing to make the 3 to 4 year cycles in many enterprises. Even when they were issued there were performance issues. Add 2 to 3 more years of software development and bloat and these quickly become unusable.

Biggest problem is the hard drive. 4500rpm PATA. Slow to begin with. Add HD encryption software that most enterprises run and you have something that is abominable.

The other problem is the RAM. 2GB max. Forget anything 64 bit. And there are some 32bit apps out there in some enterprises that do make good use out of the 3.2some GB of ram max limit.

I had a stack of these no one wanted, and no one would take, we eventually had to salvage these out after 2 years of them being around. Even a nice late run 1.33ghz D430 unit, the extra CPU made no difference. It's a rare day when laptops with warranty left go to our salvage vendor.

This is why dell started the 13 inch Latitudes in the E series. Small but with full fledged CPUs and drives. These laptops are well loved and always in demand.

The E4200 fixed these issues with the SSD and more ram and more CPU, but I think the bad taste from the D430 was too much, that and the cost of the 12 inch vrs, the added 13 inch line.

 

100% the HDD. It is IDE interface (as opposed to SATA) and lucky to break 30 meg a second data transfer rate. Add in the fact that it can not handle parallel IO requests and you have a junk laptop.

If you are still under warranty on a 430 you can warranty out the hard drive and get one that is slightly less pathetic. They are slimmer and have slightly higher transfer rates. (dont feel bad the HDD will be failing anyway)

Shame on dell for using an ipod HDD for a executive class ultra-portable...

 

They also had a bug with older versions of the storage driver that would put the drive in PIO mode (5 meg a second and 90% CPU)