My "new" Dell Latitude E6420

When buying the Dell Latitude E6410 only a couple months back I thought it would take a few more months before E6420's would show up on the second-hand market, knowing that my work one was going out of warranty after 3 years in two months from now in July. But this Tuesday I got the email notifications I setup on eBay and I thought I wouldn't pass this one.

I really like my work Dell Latitude E6420, I think it's a great work laptop with a very good design - the solid enterprise level laptops from Dell Latitude line, but this time with a design that makes you attach to it. It's the usual 14" screen but instead of a 14" chassis it is actually as wide as 15" and it does make sense. The material around the keyboard is sort of rubbery and due to the wider design and merging and moving the keyboard keys at the top right corner you get more space to rest your hands when writing those long emails or coding for hours and it feels good. Also moving the volume / mute buttons on the right makes sense, you don't have to reach for them all the way up at the top anymore.

On the keyboard redesign, yes, it might take a couple of weeks to get used to, but once I did was perfectly fine - it's good to see they kept same layout for newer models so all that adjusting effort won't be in vain. Home / End / Insert / Delete keys stayed at the top, but they are now merged with SysRq, Print Screen and Pause. That makes Ctrl + Alt + Print Screen ("current window" screenshot in Windows which I do quite a bit at times) a bit tricky when you have to use Fn function making it a four key press (3 left hand and one right hand). True, with Windows 7 and later you have the Snipping Tool if you are not a keyboard person.

Ports layout is good as always, away from your hands at the back and sides, with the nice addition of HDMI along the usual VGA port, plus a mixed USB/eSATA port (already have a USB/eSATA Vantec NextStar3 enclosure I bought a few years ago to put older hard drives from upgrading the desktop).

Speakers are quite decent, although a bit muffled as positioned underside towards you. Also regarding sound, a frustrating design change was merging the audio input and output jack - that works fine just for headphones, but if you want to use your traditional headset with separate connections, you will require an additional audio splitter cable. Annoying if you don't have one around, but same as with the keyboard layout change, they stuck with it with later models so you will get to reuse it.

Another interesting feature of this model is the Nvidia Optimus technology, where you have two graphic chips - Intel and Nvidia - and you get to choose which application runs on which through the NVIDIA Control Panel or the right-click context menu for an application.

Overall, I really like this laptop and I'm glad I could finally get one - same as before, I got it from the UK based it-zone-2 seller on eBay, very happy with it and although it was a bit of a rushed buy I don't regret it (~350 euro incl shipping). The entire laptop is in very good condition, UK keyboard (important for me) looks new, screen clean and bright (possibly new or replaced as well) and for me it was the seller point with its 1600x900 resolution. Also a bonus point is that it came with one 4GB RAM module with a slot ready for upgrade (check with seller first if not obvious from item description or BIOS screenshots), making it cheaper to upgrade to 8 GB by adding another used module for 20-30 euro or a new one for 40 euro (I could swap the memory with E6410) - it does make a difference with Windows making it a smoother experience, especially if you are going to hit it with work tasks at times (things like Eclipse or VMs or setting up RAM disks).

Dell Latitude E6420 (eBay)

• 14" screen (1600x900)
• Intel Core i5-2520M CPU @ 2.50GHz
• 4GB RAM (Samsung M471B5273DH0-CH9)
• Intel HD Graphics 3000
• NVIDIA NVS 4200M (512 MB)
• Seagate Momentus Thin (ST250LT007) SATA 250GB (NCQ)
• Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 AGN
• Windows 7 Professional

 

Temperatures after playing World Of Tanks (minimum settings), ambient 18 °C

My "new" Dell Latitude E6410

Over the years I used a few Dell laptops at work and I must say I like the Latitude E line for a few reasons - build quality, layout and design is quite different from the Inspiron (consumer) line and even the Vostro (small business) line, so you can easily access and replace components, they are compact and sturdy, good screen resolutions, solid keyboards and overall good workers. My current one is a Dell Latitude E6420 and on top of that I think it is a bit of a looker too.

Back in January I was looking for a new laptop and the new Dell Latitude 5000 line seemed interesting, but even with the January sales and fairly minimal customizations (1600x900 resolution, 8GB RAM) it went around to around 1000 Euro incl. VAT and shipping. Although good value overall, with economy noadays and money pressure it felt like a bit of a splurge as I couldn't justify the upfront cost.

And then it hit me - I've always taken good care of my work laptops and have been wondering what are companies doing with the old hardware once it was "refreshed" every 2-3 years when coming out of warranty. I remember I've asked my own company IT people a couple of years ago whether there was an option to buy them after that and they said no, probably to avoid the hassle where things could easily get mixed up and bring them more work / trouble then needed.

And they I thought, if my company doesn't sell them (employes or otherwise) it doesn't mean other companies don't do it, right? And so I've taken the search to eBay.com, then I found eBid.net and finally it appears that even Amazon.com sold used / refurbished laptops now!

Somehow it made more sense to get a used Latitude for 300 euro, get one more year or so out of it, then go to the next model, even if the yearly cost would be similar, at least if a better deal came along I didn't feel like I was stuck with it, I could give this one to someone in the family and move up.

My first "mistake" was that I started looking for a Latitude E6420 or E6430 cause I knew they were nice machines - then I realized that mine still had a few months of warranty and probably there wasn't a whole lot of them on the market, so eventually after a few weeks of searches and few missed bids I lowered my expectations and aimed for E6410, knowing though they would a slightly older generation of CPUs and chipsets, but still good Intel Core i5 machine.

My other "mistake" was to concentrate on US, cause the $  prices and their conversion to Euro was quite appealing, even including shipping costs, to find out later with a bit of a disappointment that importing them into Ireland from outside EU would mean paying import VAT at 23% from declared value + shipping charges + insurance, which overall made the option less appealing - that plus whether the product had a problem meant paying quite a back to ship it back, on top of having to use a UK power adapter and possibly not getting along with a US keyboard, although I found quite a few replacements online at a cost.

And so last week on a Tuesday evening I found more or less by accident about 10-15 Dell Latitude E6410 machines just freshly thrown on eBay by an UK seller (it-zone-2), exactly what I was looking for - not very picky, but I was looking for a few key points: a screen resolution of 1440x900 or 1600x900 (enough for Eclipse use), an Intel Core i5 (virtualization) and 4-8GB of RAM. They were getting a lot of attention - carefully picking and reading the item description (some were described as having scratches), but generally the same specs - and so I finally bought this one for 290 euro!

Dell Latitude E6410 (eBay)

• 14" screen (1440x900)
• Intel Core i5 560M @ 2.67GHz
• 4GB RAM (Samsung M471B5273CH0-CH9)
• NVIDIA Quadro NVS 3100M (512 MB)
• Seagate Momentus 7200.4 (ST9250410AS) SATA 250GB (NCQ)
• Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 AGN
• Windows 7 Home Premium

Arriving 3 days later on Friday I was very nicely impressed, not only by the speed of the delivery but also by the condition of the machine - maybe I was just lucky, but I'd like to think that it was just good business sense on the behalf of the seller.

• new keyboard (coming from a UK seller it meant I didn't have to replace it, saving 30-40 euro)
• screen in very good condition
• single 4GB RAM module (meaning I could easily install a new module and bump it up to 8GB, now this was luck :-)
• clean CPU fan, possibly newly replaced (your regular not cleaned CPU fan looks like this :-)
• generally in very good condition, bar a couple of scratches on the cover lid, absolutely fine with that, didn't buy it for looks).

Already done or planning to do some small  changes :

• Windows 7 Home Premium for Refurbed PCs 32 bit came preinstalled only seeing 3.4 GB  of RAM. In preparation for the RAM upgrade, I've downloaded and installed the 64 bit version instead.
• update BIOS from A06 to A16 (gradually going through A09 then A11 as Dell recommends in the instructions).
• install another 4GB RAM module (Samsung M471B5273CH0-CH9 from FlexxMemory.co.uk at ~40 euro, free shipping).
• replace DVD drive with a 2nd HDD caddy to install the Kingston SSDNow V300 as the primary OS drive while keeping the Seagate HDD for project files, temp files, logs, general storage etc.
• improve cooling for heavy use through a range of cheap and cheesy methods :-) This model has got quite short rubber feet, although the heat distribution on the bottom seems to be quite wide, which is good, just needs better air flow.
  
  1. furniture pads - cheap and somewhat effective to shave a couple of degrees C. Found a large set for 2 euro in a local shop but they are slippery on a kitchen table or a desk, should be careful though, still looking for some rubber ones.
  2. external laptop fan - haven't done this one yet, I'm sure it'll look tacky hanging on the side of the laptop and will have to find a way to disable that LED, but it looks cheap enough and might be effective if we get another good summer here in Ireland :-) This laptop has the heatsink on the left side, probably wouldn't mind it so much if it was at the back behind the screen.
  3. laptop cooling pad - this will probably be the most effective method, best looking, although the downside will be the cost as well as raising the laptop and possibly at an angle, needs more researching.

And that's all folks! Although there is a good chance most people are not going to go for anything like this, I know it was frustrating for me at times and felt like dropping the towel and buying one of the shelf, although at the same time it was an interesting experience and thought maybe someone else will find it useful, who knows...

Windows 7 Home Premium (x64)

Windows 8.1 Enteprise Evaluation (x64)

Cleaning your laptop fan

The other week I decided to open up my missus’ old Vaio laptop as it was having problems with some keys not typing and using pressurized air didn’t seem to do anything. 20 or so screws later, having to take the keyboard out, the keyboard cable, the touch-pad cable, some of frame, anyways a lot of work, I could see the fan at the back and said hey, I should have a look at that as well as I noticed it was struggling lately.

I thought at first that it wasn’t able to cope with today’s Flash applications and things like Yahoo Messenger and so forth – it’s an old 1.2 GHz Pentium M Mobile CPU – but man you should’ve seen the crap it collected in there over the years; dust burned to a black char got stuck in the radiator and the fan was struggling to push the air out without much success. I should’ve taken a few pictures, but it didn’t seem like something anyone would do, I said ok it had its years, it only happens to old laptops...

And I couldn’t be more wrong, cause the next day I said, ok how about my 2 years old Dell Vostro? Luckily Dell Vostro has a much better design where you can access the memory, fan and the CPU under this panel held by a couple of screws. Below you can see a couple shots with the crap in the radiator and fan blades.

To clean up, I use pressurized air and an old toothbrush for radiators, then for the fan blades cotton swabs with medicinal spirit, slowly going through the blades holding the fan so it doesn't rotate to make it easier - it’s not like I do it every day and 5 minutes later you’re done anyways.

It made quite a bit of difference to the old laptop, the fan doesn’t go on high as often and the one on my Vostro barely kicks in every now and then. For some reason I thought before blowing air (pressurized or human powered) through the vents was enough to get the stuff out of the fan, now I think I will do the real thing again every couple of years.