Dell E4300 = Fail = Hello Sony Z | NotebookReview

Prince_Phoenix Notebook Consultant NBR Reviewer

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In spite of my differences with the keyboard, turned out that Sony Z fans turned out to be right.

I await my own E4300 order, but am probably going to order a Z right away to replace it, and return the E4300 as soon as I get it when it starts exhibiting these problems.

cof said: ↑

Collected my dell latitude e4300 saturday morning (27/09) from my local depot instead of waiting for it to be delivered and been giving it a whirl for the last day or so.

First some quick figures. On my kitchen scales the e4300 with the 6 cell battery weighs about 1.8kg (4lbs). The charger and power cord weigh another 500 grams (1lb) making for a total travel weight (notebook + 6 cell battery + charger) of about 2.3 kgs (roughly 5 lbs).

The e4300 feels sturdy enough although the 6 cell battery that sticks out at the back feels a little loose when given a tug. The keyboard (uk layout) as far I can tell is almost same the size/layout as its bigger brother the e6400 except for the page up and down which are full size and placed beside the arrow keys.

When first powered up the machine spends a little over 2 minutes in some kind of bios initialization mode before booting into a windows xp setup screen - subsequent power ons are a lot faster taking about 50 seconds to a bring up a full xp desktop.

The matte display (device manager says LCD2207) is brighter and has better viewing angles than the Latitude D630 I used some months ago but I was expecting a lot more from a LED screen.

Heat wise the notebook gets a little warm on the top left near the air vent where the cpu is located but was still comfortable enough to place on my lap while wearing jeans.

Noise is a problem with this notebook. The cpu fan although not loud is audible if you're in a quiet room. The latitude D630 was almost whisper quiet in comparison. There's also a slight electronic buzz which sounds like someone sending morse code coming from the top left of the notebook which becomes extremely irritating after a while.

The battery meter claims over 6 hours when fully charged but I've gotten nearer 5 with wifi and some web browsing - will do more formal tests later.

The default software install on this machine is a mess - see attached screenshots taken from task manager and process explorer.

On booting into Windows xp over 354 mb of ram is already being used up by running processes all seemingly related to the proper functioning of this laptop. I though vista memory usage was excessive but for an xp install this is ridiculous - if only 512Meg ram was installed this machine would not be usable as a business notebook.

In general use the touchpad becomes intermittingly laggy with the mouse pointer pausing to change shape (2 black arrows,twirl) no doubt due to some value add cruft running in the background and the touchpad has twice stopped responding to finger input necessitating a windows reboot.

The bottom right of the keyboard doesn't seem to fit snuggly with the notebooks chassis leading to a noticeable flex everytime you press the page down or right arrow key.

Theres an ambient light sensor that adjusts the screen brightness on the fly depending on lighting conditions but anytime I enable it the display brightness seem to jump about a lot (even indoors at night) so I left it off.

With wireless configuration there also appears to be some kind of bun fight between windows xp,dells control point and Intel PROSet software with the apparent winner being Intel.

Not sure if there's also a problem with whatever tracks hard disk usage on this notebook as the hard disk light on the bezel is constantly flashing even when filemon.exe utility reports no file activity.

I'm going do some more tests and try and find out if I can do something about the buzzing noise, hard disk light and keyboard flex but as it stands for the price I paid this notebook is failing to impress.

Click to expand...

Prince_Phoenix, Sep 28, 2008

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sleey0 R.I.P. AW Side Topics

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You should probably give the 4300 a chance. I just returned a E6400 and got a Z instead. It really isn't a fair fight as the Z wins hands-down.

Dell used to have an advantage with their pricing, but I was able to get a Z520 for $100 more than I paid for the latitude.

sleey0, Sep 28, 2008

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Phil Retired

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Have to agree with you.

E4300: 1.8 kg, average screen, fan noise, battery sticking out, ugly on real life pictures.

I think Sony will be selling a lot of Zs. There isn't any real competition.

Phil, Sep 29, 2008

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Takashi Notebook Consultant

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PhilFlow said: ↑

Have to agree with you.

E4300: 1.8 kg, average screen, fan noise, battery sticking out, ugly on real life pictures.

I think Sony will be selling a lot of Zs. There isn't any real competition.

Click to expand...

I have to agree... after using it now for about a week, I couldn't imagine getting any other machine (at any price frankly). For me, it definitely lived up to the hype.

Takashi, Sep 29, 2008

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