Thoughts on E4310?

I'm thinking of purchasing one of these refurbished and would like any opinions on the laptop. I've had a Dell Inspiron 9300 and a Dell Latitude 630. Both have given me some problems (the 630's motherboard fried a few months one but since replacing it under warranty it's been fine). Anything I should know about this guy?

I need something portable and durable with good battery life and decent performance (able to run moderately taxing applications like MatLab well).

 

Haven't heard of any issues with the E4310 in terms of the Nvidia BGA problems (only comes with IGP). It's been awhile since those problems (stopped at D_30 series). I've used the E4300 and it's a nice little machine. I would assume the E4310 is just a platform refresh and no major changes occurred.

 

Thanks for the reply. It looks pretty solid, but I'm not a fan of the 6-cell battery sticking out the back and it's supposed to overheat pretty severely. But it's such a good deal on Dell Outlet...

 

The E4300 was a very good 13.3" notebook with a high quality display and strong performance. It has an 'old school' 16:10 aspect ratio display with 1280x800 resolution, 400:1 contrast ratio and a maximum brightness of 300nits.

The E4310 made the switch to a 16:9 display with 1366x768 resolution, but kept the same general design/appearance. The display isn't quite up to the standards of the previous model, with a contrast ratio of 300:1 and a maximum brightness of 220nits- still adequate and better than many similar models. The most critical update was the addition of the Core i-series processors and other updated hardware.

Reviews of the E4310 are limited, but there is one on the site Notebookcheck.net, which is a site I have found to be trustworthy. It is a European site (Austria) but their E4310 is/was no different than ours, so it is applicable- LINK

The review states that the system fans are quiet and often inactive, while the temperature remains within normal limits. So I don't think heat should be a big concern for you. As for not liking the 6-cell protruding from the back, all I can say is deal with it! The 3-cell base battery just isn't sufficient if you want a machine that can last more than two hours away from a plug. The 6-cell is a necessity for any sort of reasonable mobile usage of this system.

If I were you, I would purchase an E4310 from the Outlet that includes the 6-cell battery. Then I'd find a 3-cell battery on Ebay for cheap and buy it to use when you don't need more than an hour or two of battery time and/or don't want to carry about the bulking/protruding 6-cell.

As a final note, do you realize that the E4310 from the Outlet includes a 3-year Warranty, same as a new one! I also have a coupon for 15% off any Outlet Dell Latitude system, if you decide to purchase one, I'll be glad to let you use the coupon code since I don't plan on using it!

 

They are good little machines. Have used one for over a year with 0 issues. Have never called tech support on it. Heat can be an issue if you block the vents (or run Prime95 all the time). Real world on the lap heat is not a big issue.

Get the 6 cell battery. It sticks out, but its not bad.

The processors on these can not be changed. I have the 540m and it does well.

The backlit keyboard is great on these.

With the money you save, try to get 4-8gb of RAM and an SSD drive. The original 160gb 5400rpm drive really slowed the machine down. I saw a nice bump up with a 500gb 7200 rpm drive, and finally settled on an Intel 80gb SSD.

A new E6320 would give you about 2x graphics performance and a slightly heavier, but more robust case. The second gen i5 and i7 are a little better at power usage, but I don't know how much it would improve battery life.

I am personally waiting for the XT3 tablet to come out before replacing my E4310. The XT3 is very close in size to the E4310 and has the ability to be used as a tablet. While I have never found a seat in coach class on an airplane that was too cramped to open the E4310, the ability to flip the display on the XT3 would be nice. The biggest thing would be talking myself into replacing a perfectly good and reliable machine.