This review is about the Dell Latitude D505, though comments about the design of the laptop will apply to any model in the D500 series.
Size and Weight This is a mid range laptop, it’s light and compact with excellent battery life and is designed to carried around rather than being a high performance desktop replacement.
Styling The laptop is finished all over in a attractive titanium silver, the styling is quite plain with no ‘twiddly bits’ to distract the eye (...and fall off...). Build quality is excellent, the laptop has a quality solid feel.
Performance This particular model has a 1.3ghz Celeron M processor and 256mb, its not the most powerful laptop you’ll find but it’s perfectly adequate for running office applications. Windows XP and Office 2003 are both very responsive. The graphics chipset is nothing special - no games here!
Storage The laptop has no floppy drive, if you need a floppy drive then you’ll need an external floppy drive which plugs into a USB port. The laptop has a DVD and CD Writer combo drive, I’m not sure exactly what speed the drive is but it wrote a CD in just a few minutes. The laptop contains a 60gb hard drive which is more than enough storage for most people (I think the hard drive was an optional upgrade - I think it comes with a 40gb drive as standard).
Battery Life Battery life is excellent, I’ve had around 4.5 hours of general usage from the laptop without needing to plug it in. I wasn’t using the DVD drive during this time, doing so would probably cut the battery life quite a bit.
Screen My particular model has only a 14” screen which is very clear and sharp and capable of a resolution of 1024 x 768 (XGA). However, Dell do the same chassis with a 15” screen so I’d go for that if possible although a bigger screen would reduce the battery life.
Networking The laptop includes a 10/100 wired ethernet network port and built in wireless 802.11b/g (wifi) (supporting 11mb and 54mb wireless networks) networking. The wireless network uses a Dell chipset which comes with a useful driver utility to set up and configure wireless network settings. The aerial seems to be well positioned in the laptop - it gets good reception in a location where my other laptop struggles to find a signal. According to Dell the only reason this laptop does not have an Intel Centrino badge is because it uses the Dell wireless chipset instead of the Intel one.
Also included is a plain old 56k modem.
Ports The laptop has a firewire port for connection of a digital video camera or iPOD, a nice feature but not something I’ve actually used.
Only two USB ports are provided and both of these are around the back of the laptop. I would have liked to have seen more, particularly with the lack of floppy drive. Perhaps with one around the side of the laptop to make it easy to plug in a memory key.
A external VGA port is provided to enable the laptop to be plugged into a monitor or projector.
An infra red port is included, although by default it was disabled in the BIOS when I received the laptop which is poor.
Microphone and headphone ports are provided, conveniently located around the left hand side of the laptop.
A serial port and PS/2 port for an external mouse or keyboard is provided.
A single PC card slot is provided, one is probably all you’ll need given that the laptop has built in network and wireless network.
Using the Laptop The laptop has a very nice keyboard, the keys have plenty of travel and is a pleasure to type on. Included is a basic trackpad with two buttons, this is responsive and quite pleasant to use. The laptop doesn’t get too hot to use on your lap.
Power Supply The power supply is worth a special mention, as it is shaped to allow the cable to be wrapped tidily around it and has a built in strap to retain the cable. Much better than the bit of Velcro you get to try and tame the leads on other power bricks!
Value The laptop is quite expensive, its probably possible to find an equivalent spec laptop from Toshiba or similar for £100-200 less. Whether or not this laptop is good value to you depends on whether you think Dell’s build quality and support services are worth the extra premium.
More details
Memory / capacity
Good
Ease of use
Easy
Range of Extra Features
Good
Instruction manual
Satisfactory
Manufacturer Support
Good
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