A solid and reliable workhorse. Pick up a used one!
Written: Dec 07 '01 (Updated Dec 07 '01)
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Pros: Incredibly reliable; Extensive battery life; Fast enough; Nice keyboard; No eraserhead pointer.
Cons: It's getting obsolete: outmoded NeoMagic video, limited memory expansion, neither modem or ethernet built-in.
The Bottom Line: If you want a laptop and are scouring the used market, this is a great choice that you'll be happy with for a long time to come.
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| majick's Full Review: Dell Latitude Cpi A400XT |
If you're shopping for older notebooks, the Latitude CPi A400XT ought to be on your short list. While it's certainly getting a little long in the tooth, the CPi is an outstanding performer in its class and is an excellent choice.
When these were new, I performed the technical evaluation and approval for a corporate purchase. In a fairly crowded field, the CPi stood out as a good, well-designed package.
I've always considered the keyboard to be an important aspect of laptops that is frequently poorly designed. I'm happy to report that this keyboard is pleasant to use with full-size keys and fairly good travel. Unlike many other laptop keyboards, it's fairly easy to forget it's not the real thing. Placement of the Ins, Del, Home, End, PgUp, PgDown set is a little odd, up in the far right corner. It makes up for it by having a full two-key wide backspace, a key-and-a-half wide backslash key, both correctly placed, as well as a set of cursor keys nicely offset from the rest of the keyboard in a natural arrangement and place. Ctrl and Fn keys are in a sensible place, and the usually annoying Windows key isn't in the way at all. The "other Windows key" ("Menu", I believe it's called) is tucked away obscurely at the top and doesn't bother anyone from there. The Esc key could be bigger, but that's my only complaint about this otherwise very well-made keyboard.
The built-in Synaptics touchpad pointer, while a little too sensitive until you adjust a simple control panel setting, works nicely. The hard disk (in my case, an IBM DBCA 6G) is a hair faster than the more common Fujitsu laptop disks.
The 2D/desktop video is plenty fast at 1024 x 768 x 16-bit and even compatible with DirectX 8, although there is absolutely no 3D acceleration whatsoever. The LCD display, however, is of excellent quality. I have never seen one with a bad pixel, although I'm sure it happens sometimes. Viewing angle is quite good from left to right, and acceptably wide in the vertical direction. Colors are bright and vibrant, and blacks are good and solid. The backlight is powerful and visible under nearly all conditions, even on the most dim setting. The display's surface is easy to clean and doesn't appear to be easy to scratch. Mine is still clean and smooth even after more than a year's use and abuse.
Audio isn't anything spectacular -- simple 16-bit stereo -- but neither is there anything to complain about, it sounds just fine. There are the customary mic, headphone, and line-in connectors very accesibly placed along the right side. The built-in speakers aren't going to blow your socks off. They're slightly better than average as laptop speakers go, but as we all know, even that's nothing impressive.
There are two big bays in the front of the case. One holds a lithium-ion battery and the other is a swapable bay that can support the floppy drive, CD-ROM, or -- although Dell doesn't explicitly say so -- the current generation of Latitude DVD and CD-RW drives. Under Win9x and NT, these are "warm-swappable" with the special utility available from Dell. You have to fiddle with a tray icon to do it, but it works fine. Under Windows XP, the hot-swap bay is fully supported out of the box without any fiddling whatsoever. With Linux, I wouldn't recommend it but if you're careful it shouldn't be a big problem.
The floppy drive comes with a handy cable that allows it to be attached to the printer port. If you need both floppy and CD or DVD drives, this is a simple and effective way to get it.
Mainly I use the Latitude in a dual-battery configuration that gives me an astounding 7 to 8 hour battery time, even with a wireless NIC running full blast.
And adding a NIC or modem, wireless or not, is painless. There are two readily usable PCMCIA slots on the left, which took me a while to get used to but isn't an inconvenience at all. The PCMCIA controllers are utterly common TI-1225s -- they work just fine under all types of Windows, but have a small handful of well-known bugs that need consideration if you plan to run Linux.
The external ports are a perfectly good collection, although not generous: One each of printer, serial, PS2, USB, as well as an external video connector that gives a good, clean picture.
The memory, as shipped, is pretty minimalist: a measly 64M. That's easily and cheaply remedied through a handy panel on the bottom which can accept two inexpensive standard SODIMM memory modules, but unfortunately according to the spec the Dell CPi A400XT only accepts a maximum of 256M. The Intel 443BX chipset used is capable of using more memory, but apparently Dell doesn't support it. Try it at your own risk.
Hard disk upgrades are equally easy. With the removal of two screws, the disk tray slides out of the left side without any case wrangling at all.
The casing itself is solid and mildly attractive although utilitarian, with excellent build quality. I've used laptops that feel flimsy and delicate, and the CPi A400XT is definitely not one of them. It has stood up without complaint to several flights, manhandling around the house and office, and even a spill off the arm of a couch (Bad cat! No!). The whole package is a bit heavy with dual batteries, but otherwise is light and easy to handle.
The Dell BIOS Setup doesn't offer many options in terms of tweaking and performance tuning, but is otherwise quite easy to use and fairly comprehensive. Make sure to update to a recent BIOS, because earlier versions had quite a variety of problems. Recent versions (A14, at the time of writing) have full and working ACPI power management support and offer compatibility with Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Don't get me wrong: The Dell Latitude CPi A400XT is nearly obsolete compared to current retail offerings. The CPU isn't a scorcher by today's standards, but given sufficient memory it's more than sufficient for just about everything you could put to it, except for gaming. For office tasks and presentations, web browsing, note-taking and writing, network administration, even moderate graphics work, and anything else that doesn't need every bit of processor power you can throw at it, it works just great!
There are a lot of previous-generation laptops out on the used market right now, but you would be wise to consider the Dell Latitude CPi A400XT if one is available to you. The quality and thoughtful design really make it outshine the equivalent systems. It's reliable (I've only crashed it through my own mistakes) and well-made.
[A disclaimer to the reader: I received my Lattitude CPi for free, getting it when it was going to be scrapped. Despite that, I would gladly pay money for it -- remember, I picked them out for purchase in the first place!]
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 0.00
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium II
Processor speed: 301-400
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Epinions.com ID:
majick
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Member: Majick The Pseudonymous
Reviews written: 12
Trusted by: 4 members
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