Dell Latitude D630 – Very Good Business Laptop

It seems that Dell laptops are sprouting all over here at our office. This morning, I got my hands on a Dell Latitude D630 business notebook (a colleague of mine wanted me to check it out) and since I was fooling around with it anyway, I thought I’d write a short review.

The D630 (sounds like a DSLR model from Nikon) looks impressive at first glance. With its black and gray looks, the laptop was clearly shouting “business” to me so I had no aspiration of it being a gaming right. According to the spec sheet, the unit weighs a hefty 4.31bs (although it felt more than that) and measures 13.37″ x 9.37″ x 1.26″. It came in with an Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 processor with 2GB of RAM (DDR2), an 80GB HDD and an 8x DVD-R/W drive (internal). Pre-installed is Windows XP Professional (SP2). Checking out the physical features of the unit, it comes with four (4) USB ports, a FireWire port and the usual slew of ports you can find on most laptops (VGA, telephone, LAN, microphone, headset, serial and docking port). I liked the layout of the ports as these were strategically placed around the sides and back of the unit, unlike this D430 that I’m using where all the ports are all at the back. The size of the HDD is a bit small, considering that a lot of newer laptops have a 120GB HDD as a standard. However, the size of the HDD would be more than suffice for storing work files, a considerable amount of photos and a decent MP3 collection. If you’re intending it to be a multi-media jukebox, forget it: the D630 (I think) doesn’t have the space for that – unless you buy an external HDD.

The Dell D630 has two (2) pointing devices: a touchpad and a track stick. I liked the feel of the full sized keyboard and the construction of the unit looks solid (magnesium chassis and hard packed plastic for the covers). The thing feels very sturdy! There’s also no flexing on the screen when you swing it out or in so seeing ripples accross the LCD screen were out. Checking the manual, I was a bit disappointed as it was rather useless i.e. to little information for a user. My Taiwan-made MP3 player’s manual had more information on it. Sure, us guys who’ve been tinkering with computers for years would find it easy to figure out where everything is and how everything works but for newbie users, the manual would be useless. Apps that came with the unit, vanilla stuff (OS, Roxio 9 and Dell drivers/apps), although I was not expecting much. Hey, Dell won’t throw in Pinnacle or Adobe into the package now, would they? I won’t.

Compared to the Acer Aspire 4720z (Vista) that I had reviewed, the D630 booted-up quite fast (the fast 2GB RAM was serving the unit well). Remembering I have DVD-movie inside my drawer, I decided to check out how the D630 would fare out. The colors and contrast that were presented left me a bit disappointed but hey, the D630 is a business notebook so it just had the standard Intel Graphics Media accelerator. Horizontal viewing angles were good but the vertical viewing angle is so-so. Checking the apps installed, I saw that my colleague installed Photofiltre for his image-processing needs so I slapped on my USB drive and proceeded to fool around with my JPEG images. As with what I had seen when I was watching the movie, colors and contrast were a bit so-so. While I won’t recommend the D630 for graphics intensive work, it’s “imaging capability” would be more than suffice for editing photos destined for your photo album.

As the D630 is not a machine built for multi-media applications, the sound quality of it’s speakers is so-so. However, if you’re just gonna hear your usual “you got mail!” alert then the speaker would be more than suffice. Quality of audio while playing MP3s you say? Well, not so good. Tolerable but it ain’t no home theater. As the unit was not mine, I was not able to toy with it the way I wanted to so I just tooled around the usual productivity apps. Running FireFox, working with Office, using WiFi and playing MP3s, the battery lasted a decent 3 hours, 45 minutes. If it had the 9-cell battery, I’d bet it would have lasted much longer – close to 5.5 hours probably.

Aside from the D630 being a heavy (it’s marketed as a light notebook), I had really no serious complaints with the unit. It looks good, it works well, it has an internal optical drive (unlike this D430) I’m using and has a solid, all around feel. I think Dell has a winner here again.

Cheers!