Dell Latitude 2110 Netbook

A very brief review of the Dell Latitude 2110 Netbook (USA people click HERE). There is a few good reasons why this might suit your needs over the Acer and others out there and the price range is $400+ or £289 – a lot depends on the specs your choose of course such as operating system, memory and hard drive etc. This is just an overview as I only had one day to take a look at this device and get it ready with Windows XP.

First the Specs

It is running an Intel Atom N470 which runs at 1.83Ghz with 512KB L2 Cache.

The Chipset is Intel NM10 Express

Display options are all 10.1″ but can either be 1024×600, 1024×600 with touchscreen or 1366×768 TrueLife LED

Graphics is powered by Intel GMA 3150 (optional Broadcom Crystal HD media accelerator

Memory can be up to 2 GIG Ram DDR2 (One slot)

Hard Drive is 250 GIG or 64GIG SSD

3 x USB, VGA port, Network port, Audio.

Built in Webcam

The beast in action

Model Tested

The model I had to get ready was the 10.1″ 1024×600 with touchscreen and 3G card fitted (for mobile broadband) with 2 GIG ram and 250GIG Drive fitted plus the 6 Cell Battery. It came pre-installed with Windows XP Pro from Dell and pre-built with all there apps.

Initial testing

The screen size presented a problem (as it does with all netbooks) and the first task was to update windows with every single update and this process was very slow indeed. After the first round of 23 updates and a restart, Explorer would crash upon starting and finally fixed this by de-installing Explorer 8 and reverting to 7 until it self updated itself later. Dell had managed to install Windows Search which made a already slow laptop slower and more work to get rid of all the junk.

3G Problems

With a sim fitted – it stated it could not find the 3G Card (that’s the hardware not the sim) and eventually had to get on the phone to Dell who took control and 3 engineers later – finally they installed some Vodafone software, they could not explain why there software did not work.

What about the laptop?

It has a rubberised coating both top and bottom and feels quite durable and the chic keys are something you either love or hate. The speed of the device felt very sluggish though this might have something to do with all the junk Dell like to Install. The only user serviceable parts is when you take off the battery allowing you to slot in a SIM Card for the broadband. What if you had a lot to built – this is were another call to Dell comes into play…

Getting down and dirty

I was un-sure how you took the hard drive out and called Dell – they were shocked I needed to remove the hard drive and questioned me why. After explaining that I need to make an image and build a lot – they soon got the manual out. You have to remove that battery, remote Two screws and now the Keyboard comes out, unclipped the connected flat cable of course. Now you need to remove 3 Screws and flip the thing over, remove another 4 and now the Laptop comes apart - revealing the motherboard. From here you need to take another 4 screws out of the hard drive and you can now image that beast. I am not looking forward to repeating this over and over again – Why on earth did Dell not make it easier?

Thoughts

The battery (6-Cell) forms a sort of stand and lasts quite some time and the touch screen is sort of responsive but not amazing. I personally think it is no better then any of the other Netbooks out there and seems to cost more. The 3G built in is a nice feature though and may suit some people.