Vostro 3400 - who else?

Also, your XPS M1330 and Studio 14z are consumer level machines, thats why they are highly customizable. These are small business machines. Dell's marketing strategy is you pick a model that is closest to your needs and with in your budget and you order 5 of them. Its less hassel, especially when you are dealing with businesses that most likely are not technology based and lack IT departments to that would want to sift through detailed components.

 

The new latitudes come with Genuine Windows Vista Home Basic SP2, 32-bit... :/

+1 When I was in helpdesk, we didn't have any time to go through a bunch of specs. Plus we ordered like 20 or so at a clip, so it was easy to get WDS setup and etc. Granted there were some other cases in which we ordered a one off, but that was rare.

 

no, Asus is the only manufacturer that uses nvidia optimus

 

I just received my Vostro 3400. this is my second vostro my first one was the V13 which had a solid build just a bit on the slow side(i got it fully loaded) So when the 3000 series came out i saw how sturdy they looked when compared to the previous 1x20 series vostro. I am very happy with my 3400. i got it with the i5-520m, 6gb ram, nvidia 310, 500GB HDD, 7 ultimate 64.

but when i got it i pulled the 2gb stick and put a 4bg stick in for 8gb, pulled out the 500GB and put in a 256GB dell ssd with Trim, and will be putting in a 6300 intel wireless card(the 3400 only ships with 2 antenia wires but i did find a antenia from an older laptop that had a 1" lead to the tiny antenia array that i will put where the wwan card goes for the 3rd antenia) I run vmware alot and this thing rocks i set the virtual os (suse 11) to use 2 cores and 2GB of ram and it smokes. the processor was able to idle at 1.3ghz but if i hit it hard then would go up to 2.66GHZ because suse was using 2 cores i set it to one core and hit it and it got to 2.93 GHZ per CPU-Z and in windows 7 i get on the performance 6.7/6.7/4.9/5.9/7.1. The system feels solid and so far no complaints except for the backlight on the KB must be turned on every time you reboot but i assume they will fix that in the next bios rev.

my order date was 3/19/10
My deleivery date was 3/29/10

EEDIT: oh and no optimus.

 

Ok, reading through here, I need to say something, even though you are getting a 32-bit OS, you can still use that SAME key to install the same version, but in 64-bit. Just download the 64-bit DVD here. [Completely LEGAL]

BTW, congrats to those who have purchased. I personally wouldn't buy a Vostro, to me they seem like lesser quality Latitudes for business users on the cheap. - May not be this way, I have never used one, just from my observations

 

they where of lesser quality in my opinion as well but the 3400 seems very riggad and feels like a quality built notebook. i am very happy with it i only wish it had a slightly better video card...caugh...ATI...caugh that would be the only way to make it beter besides the backlight keyboard issue i mentioned earlier.

 

you got yours that quickly? I ordered mine on 3/17 and it hasn't even shipped yet, the estimated delivery is 4/12. And I got one of the bottom end models with only a upgrade in ram and a 320GB hard drive.

 

Thanks for the mini review! Could you also comment on the screen quality and fan noise? These are two thing which can make or break a laptop for me.

 

My ship date actually just got moved up to next week (was supposed to be the 20th). I am glad to hear about the sturdiness. I wish I could have afforded a latitude, but a similar spec'd latitude would have run me over $1300, about $400 outside of my budget. A better video card would have been ok, but I am not playing games on it, just need it to handle video and imaging well.

 

The screen quality is great its no IPS display though. color and brightness is great and the matt Finish is a plus. The fan noise is there but ist like any other notebook i have used none are silent but its pretty quiet most of the time.