Vostro 3400 - who else?

i just ordered the 9 cell. the resolution is fine i wish it was higher but i am ok with it. well for notebooks i always recommend compleate care (accidental damage. and if you want US based phone support get prosupport. and you can but dont have to get the 2nd-3rd year battery warranty that will cover the battery for 1 replacement outside of the 1 year warranty that batteries get.

 

although i know that the topic is about the 3400, i bought a 3300 and let me tell you guys i made a big mistake. The battery life is poor, very very poor. It gets easily hot and for last but not lesser important, it is mono audio (when i was checking the product i've opened the 3400 description and i implied that the 3300 was almost the same...shame on me, it is completely different). Monday i will send it back and probably i will buy the latitude e6410 because according to people review that laptop with the 9 cell got 5.47min under considerate load.
I want a computer that stands at least for 6 hour under word processor software because i'm a software engineering, even if i have to buy a macbook pro and use windows under parallels.

 

I don't think a Macbook Pro will get you that kind of battery life in Windows. I'm one one right now running Win7 and the battery life is about half of what I get in OS X. It seems like Apple intentionally made terrible drivers for Windows in Boot Camp. What advantages are there with getting the E6410 instead of a 3400?

 

i meant advantages in confront of the 3300 not the 3400, i'm from europe and here dell did not provide the 3400 model and the 3500 is just too big. The 3300 battery life is ludicrous in confront of the 6410. On this forum you can check the review by a user that according to him under considerate load the battery life is almost 6 hours with a 9 cell. Probably it could stands also 8 hours under word processor software.

On the macbook topic, you got me wrong. When i said using windows on it i did not mention using window with boot camp, i meant using it with parallels 5. If you haven't tried it, i think you should search some review even on you tube, that application just seem to be amazing. A friend who use it told me that the battery maintains almost the same life and it do not suffer of performance like virtual softwares for windows. Trust me if you never tried it, download the demo and try it out, if you do it please let me know about your experience. We could say that it differentiate from others virtualization software because it integrate the virtual so on mac osx.
So the main problem, at least for me, is that i'm a software eng. and i use to develop a lot of codes, even 3d applications which makes use of dx 10. With parallels 5 not only you get fully windows support but also dx support but that's the problem, at this time they can support only dx 9.

 

well from what i see there arnt many

Latitude
+Docking
+slightly better video card
---Embasy secuity if you use a finger print reader
------Costs more than the 3400
+Has higher resolution screen option
+has the intel 6300 option
+has more config options includion core i7 dual core.

 

Yeah, I thought you meant Boot Camp. Parallels is great in my opinion, as is VMware Fusion. They both integrate very well with OS X. On one of them you can run a Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine so you get the full Windows experience on Boot Camp and then run the same applications in OS X if you don't need DX10.

 

Two questions:
- "very poor battery life" - how long will it last?
- What do you mean by "mono". Are the internal speakers mono, or are the headphones mono, too?

I ordered a Vostro 3330 some days ago, so I am very interested in your experience.

 

About the battery let me clarify that mine 3300 doesn't have the 8 cell, instead it has the 4 cell because they do not sell the 8 cell in europe yet ( i really don't understand why...they all come from china). Let say that under the same condition that the vostro 3400 has been tested the 3300 with the 4 cell might get 1:30-1:40. Until you just use word or you just surf on the web windows tells that it last for 2:30-3:00, as soon as you start to listening to music or worst watch a video it drops a lot, specially if you don't turn of the wi-fi. Just to make an example i had 70% of the battery and windows was signaling 2:10, as soon i started a you tube video it dropped to 1:15. That's not acceptable for me because with my old xps m1530 and the original 6 cell battery i had much more life, even if i was watching video on youtube...to be clearer it didn't use to drop that much but on the xps the whole hardware should consume more watt. So on this machine i expected to have a better battery life in confront of my old laptop.


Just the internal speaker is mono, but c'mon even netbooks have stereo sound...even mobile phones have...there is no excuse....we are in 2010...


For the rest the performance is noticeable, mine has a i5 520m with 6 gb 1333
and let me tell you this....this is so damn fast. Before anyone blame me for that processor, in my experience (i'm software eng.) it is much better to have more ram than the fastest processor because programs to run needs to be on the memory (processor cannot access the hd ) so it is much better to have more ram so the so can allocate more software on the ram than having the so swapping every millisecond from the virtual memory to the real memory because that's what the computer keep doing even if you have just a few programs opened. The more memory you have the lesser will be on the virtual memory.

my old xps had a t7500 with 4 gb 667

 

Thank for your sharing your experience. My own Vostro 3300 has arrived and I can spend some time with it tonight
I got myself the same configuration with core i5, 6 GB and 4 cell battery, I am in software engineering, too.
I hope that a battery with more cells will be available soon.

What I don't understand: Why does Europe get the Vostro 3300 and US the Vostro 3400? At DELL, do they think that Europe does not buy 14" or the US does not buy 13"-notebooks?

 

here in the us we have all 4 3300, 3400, 3500, 3700

No clue why they dont offer the 3400 in europe. did you try calling sales to order the 3400 over the phone?