A wonderful package
Written: Mar 26 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: BIOS, reliability, strength, performance, touchpad, et cetera
Cons: none
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| mhudack's Full Review: Dell Latitude Cpt C400GT |
I've needed a laptop for ages and normally my company has chosen for me. This time it was my turn - I chose it, they paid for it. Anything left over from my budget went to be me, hence the choice of a Celeron.
The entire package is very robust, with special "padding" to prevent hard drive corruption and fragmantation during travel. In addition, the entire case feels almost like metal - but with the lightweight features of heavy plastic (note: magnesium, used by some notebook vendors, is lighter than most durable plastics).
The Celeron is a huge hit - personally performed benchmarks show it only slightly slower than comparable Pentium IIs, edging them out on programs where processor cache is important (unlike the Pentium IIs, celeron cache is directly on the die, although there is half as much of it).
The feature that stood out most for me was the wonderful Dell-proprietary BIOS. Normally you have to reboot and hit a key (usually Delete) as you boot up to use your BIOS, then you have to reboot again to make changes take effect. Apparently Dell didn't feel that was good enough. Although you sacrifice some hard drive space (about 100 megs) you can hit a key combination (Function-F8, I believe) to bring up the BIOS in any operating system (it's NOT Windows specific!). From there, most changes can be made without a reboot. Woot!
The touchpad is very responsive and doesn't seem to have the typical touchpad symptom of "palming" - that is, having your palm move the pointer while typing. In addition, the included Synaptics (sp?) software allows you to tap the touchpad for a click (you get around a 3% performance degredation from the Synaptics software).
Altogether a fantastic package! Incidentally, don't bother with getting Microsoft Office on install, go for Works. Why? Because you can purchase the Office upgrade, which allows you to upgrade Works. Works is free and the upgrade is a fraction of the cost of a full install.
Highly recommended system!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
mhudack
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Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 41
Trusted by: 29 members
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