Dell Latitude D420 laptop computer review

Design  

The Latitude D420 is attractive for a business laptop. It's not in the same realm as the Sony Vaio TX series, and its ugly gunmetal exterior doesn't do much for it, but its matte-black interior is very easy on the eye. The unit is extremely portable thanks to its 12.1-inch screen and 1.5kg chassis, which is barely noticeable when carried in a briefcase. Dell has managed to incorporate an almost full-sized keyboard. The Return key is of the standard size and shape; the Tab, Caps Lock and Shift keys are of the right size and the Ctrl key is positioned to the left of the Fn key -- where it should be. As well as the ordinary mouse trackpad, Dell has managed to incorporate a trackpoint mouse 'nipple' between the G and H keys -- complete with corresponding selector buttons below the space bar. The mouse trackpad selector buttons are separated by a fingerprint reader for secure logins.   There's a trackpoint 'nipple' as well as the standard trackpad   There's no integrated webcam on the Latitude D420, so you can't make a visual record of meetings. Nor does it have an integrated optical drive, so you'll have to connect the accompanying Media Base for this luxury. To the left of the laptop is a PC Card slot, memory card reader and a couple of audio jacks. You'll find the power button on the right side near the hinge, a single USB port, and a hardware switch for enabling the Wi-Fi adaptor. This doubles as a Wi-Fi sniffer -- seeking out wireless networks whether the laptop is switched on or off.The power button sits at the side, alongside a Wi-Fi sniffer switch Dell has chosen to position the majority of the ports to the rear of the laptop. There are three USB ports, one four-pin FireWire port, an infrared port, a D-Sub video port and LAN and modem ports. Having most of the ports at the rear helps to keep everything neat, but you may run into difficulties when using the D420 on small desks when large USB devices stick out at the rear.   

Features

The Latitude D420 is the first sub-2kg laptop to use an Intel dual-core processor -- most of other laptops use a Core Solo or single core Pentium M processor. In this case it's the ultra-low voltage (ULV) 1.2GHz Intel U2500 -- the slowest in the mobile dual-core range. Latitude D420 is paired with 1GB of RAM -- with an ample amount of RAM,the Latitude D420 shouldn't require users to reboot every few hours or close application windows to free up memory.   

Performance

We are expecting little in the way of performance from the Latitude D420. Sure enough, its bottom-rung dual-core processor clocked up a relatively low 1,911 in PCMark 2005. It's important to remember, however, that this score wouldn't have looked out of place on high-end desktop PCs a couple of years ago. The Latitude D420's gaming performance is nothing to write home about. The Latitude D420's integrated graphics adaptor score a paltry 145 in 3DMark 2006, and we didn't even bother running F.E.A.R on it -- it's unplayable. The laptop impressed people with the Latitude D420 battery(same as Latitude D430 battery pack) life, though. It lasted an impressive 208 minutes in a MobileMark 2005 test, so it should have enough stamina to last most users throughout the working day.

The Dell Latitude D420 uses the battery with same specifications as the Latitude D430's.