I bought the C400 for a user who'd been complaining about lugging a 7 pound laptop around because she has a bad back. The C400 fits in nicely for this specific need. It is only half the weight and can be fit in a pocket of a small briefcase so a separate carrying bag isn't necessary.

For an ultra-light laptop the major concern is possible sub-par performance. Fortunately this is not the case for C400. Ours came with a humble configuration of P-III 866 with 128 Mb memory and 20 Gb hard drive. We loaded Windows 2000 Pro and the regular suite of business applications: Office, Project, and Acrobat. Playing a multimedia-heavy slide show with some analysis programs running in background is no problem at all. The video/audio playback is also decent, more than adequate for regular business use.

The laptop has all the necessary connectivity options except built-in parallel. Parallel port is not a problem for us b/c most users have new printers with USB connectivity or simply use a network printer.

C400 is upgradeable. Memory can be added (up to 1 Gb) with little effort just like other Latitude models. Hard drive is also user-removable.

Being small does need to sacrifice some features. C400 has no built in CD or floppy drive. They all have to be connected through an external cable connector. The connector is somewhat awkward to use especially with the CD-ROM drive. It took me a while to figure out the right angel and level of force to get a reliable connection. The computer won't start if it has an incorrectly connected CD-ROM drive. As usual with ultra light laptops, the screen isn't big enough if you really need some display real estate.

We've had the laptop for more than 8 months now and haven't had any problem. By the way, Dell has an even lighter (starting 2.9 lb) choice now, the Latitude X200. Just gotta pay a little more...

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 2100
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 801-900
Screen Size: 12 inches
RAM: 128
Hard Drive (GB): 21-30