Need some help; E6500 maybe?

The only reason I could see for choosing the E6500 over the E6400 is for the WUXGA (1920x1200) CCFL display option and/or the marginally better GPU performance (NVIDIA).

When you get an E6400, I HIGHLY recommend upgrading to the WXGA+ (1440x900) LED display! It's currently priced at $79, but I think it's well worth. I'm also a big fan of the 9-cell battery on mine, but it does add a little more weight.

 

IMHO, a WUXGA is an overkill for a laptop screen. But everyone has their preference I suppose. CCFL doesn't really improve the LCD. It's just a light course. It it bulky, heavy and uses MUCH more power. For a really good LCD, get an IPS instead of the regular TN LCD found on most laptops. I know some Lenovos and Toshiba's come with them. IPS has almost 179 degree viewing angles and no color inversion.

 

The WUXGA in the E6500 is actually a dual-lamp CCFL that displays up to 75% of the color gamut vs. 45% for all the E6400/E6500 display options. It's also rated at a very bright 350-nits compared to the 220-300 for the various other display choices. The image quality is actually the best I've ever seen on a business-oriented (anti-glare) laptop display. But there's a price to be paid- at full brightness, it uses more than double the energy of the lower-res LED displays! And it weighs a bit more also....

I don't think Lenovo has made their FlexView displays in several years, unfortunately. The T60 was the last model that I knew of with it as an options. There are quite a few folks today who'd love to have it!

 

At $79 extra I take your point. The critical issue to me is that it maintains the same aspect ratio; which it does. My existing D600 has a funky ratio which means that users of my s/w can experience text truncation if I'm not careful.

I do work primarily with a standard keyboard and monitor via a docking station.

Regarding the 64Gb ssd I'm really stuck with Dell's offering since this will be the primary drive with the OS etc. From what I've read a ssd goes through an initial performance drop because writes slowly get replaced by delete/writes as the disk gets populated. I guess I'll find out in 2 or 3 years whether the disk starts to really fail though. I do backup on a daily basis but any disk failure can become a major irritation just because of the down time.

I guess even the 7200rpm hard drive has some potential reliability issues given the higher spin speed. If anyone has any recommendations for a better HD than the Western Digital model WD3200BJKT I would be interested. Capacity is not a big factor, I could go much lower if need be.

Thanks for all the great input so far; I really appreciate it.

 

the RGBLED display actually consumes more power than the 2CCFL actually.