Latitude E4300 first impressions

Heat is a bit subjective
I should be receiving my E4300 earlier than planned, I'm making a little review as soon as I get it !

 

Regarding the memory, the one available at least in Europe is only the 800Mhz one despite the E4300 is the only latitude of the E series to enable 1066Mhz.
Therefore I would be curious to know which memory has been shipped so far by Dell as to my knowledge when you look for So-Dimm DDR3 memory, only 1066Mhz or 1333 Mhz are available... So it is possible that from the start the 800 Mhz memory for the E4300 is a mistake and that it runs in 1066 Mhz, unless Dell bought a stock of 800 Mhz DDR3 which was produced only for its needs.

 

Well, I was pretty thrilled to get my E4300 today. I've been limping along with a Panny CF-74 with one broken screen hinge, a 10 minute battery life, dead built-in WiFi, and green-only VGA output for a few months while deciding what to buy. The E4300's size, weight, and availability in red finally got me motivated, and I saved $500 just by calling for a quote.

The good news:
- The laptop feels very solid. It's thin, considerably lighter than the CF-74, and yet doesn't feel fragile like the Panasonic Y series.

- The red looks nice

The bad news:
- The laptop does not actually power on. With any one of the three AC adapters I got, no power light, no battery charging light, and the power switch does nothing except cause a faint clicking from near where the AC adapter plugs in. Spent an hour or so on the phone with tech support, reseating memory and hard drive, trying with and without battery, all that. It's dead.

Back to good news:
- Supposedly I'll have a replacement in hand in 3-5 business days, which is pretty impressive for a custom build.

I've been around enough to know that these things happen, and there is some defect and damaged-in-shipping rate for any manufacturer. I'm disappointed, of course, but hopefully the replacement appears quickly and is happy and healthy. If not, it;s back to the Lenovo X200s, which I would have gone for but for the lack of availability in red. Hey, these things matter to some people.

 

^^LOL on the "red". I hear ya dude. Good luck with your new build.

 

Contrary to what is written in Europe about 800MHz memory, it seems everybody receive 1066MHz memory. My reprensentative also told me it was 1066MHz, and if you look into the tech specs here : http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/p...s=ukbsdt1&id=laptop_latitude_e4300&l=en&s=bsd you can see 1066MHz.
The problem is the same with the screen : it is written no where that it goes LED in europe, except in the tech specs...

 

@Prince_Phoenix: I think I read every post of you in this thread and your review, so I knew what your complains about the NB are.
I was just wondering, why you found the NB nice and cool, while the other review made heat an explicit con. This was the first complain about heat with the E4300 I heard about, I don't remember any of the guys here complaining about that.

Thank you for your review btw

tizz

 

A french user has recently reported that the backlighted E4300 keyboard was noisy, noisier than D630 or D620...

 

Tizz: I wrote that it was "Relatively Cool and Quiet"

Yes, it gets warm. Significantly warmer than my X61 Tablet, but not as hot as my Dell D820. I leave my Dell D820 on a Zalman NC2000 cooler 24/7 as a result. So as a result it's "relatively cool and quiet."

It's mostly if you put your hand/leg/whatever by the vent, that you'll especially feel the heat.

 

You wrote: "Compared to my D820, which gets uncomfortably warm, the E4300 is cool as a breeze."
That's what made me think: heat is not a problem. Although I don't expect a Is-it-even-on? experience putting it on my lap...
ZDNet now writes in their Pro/Con list: "Gets seriously hot [...]". This is what confused me a bit. But maybe it's just my lack of experience with business class notebooks.

 

I have been using the E4300 for about two weeks and haven't noticed any problems with heat and yes it sits on my lap most of the time. I also have 4 Gig of Ram and the 120 Gig SSD. This machine is also very quiet. I also have a Dell XPS M1710 which I can't put on my lap because of the heat.