I’ve owned Dells since, well, since I’ve owned Macs and Sun equipment. In 2001 I finally decided I was sick of buying, and parting together a machine with no real warranty – when I could buy one much cheaper which would generally do what I wanted.

My last few machines, all laptops, in successive order:
Inspiron 6400, Vostro 1400, the Inspiron 1525, and now, the Latitude E6500.

The Inspiron 6400 was sold when I obtained the Vostro, the Vostro met an untimely death and was replaced hastily (and cheaply) with the 1525; the 1525 consistantly overheated and the 1280×900 screen was way too small for working in. Even with virtual desktops, I kept running out of space.

I spoke with my Dell Gold Team Rep, and opted on the E6500n.

The Good:

• It’s still a paltry 15.4”, but I’m not into huge machines – I want functionality. I did get WUXGA (1920×1200) resolution.
• 4G RAM More RAM = Better Than. Spiffyfast.
• 250G SATA-2 w/ Drop Sensor. 7200rpm makes it pretty speedy.
• No OS! (FreeDOS), hence the E6500n.
• Intel PRO/1000 Ethernet. Industry-standard, even if the stock linux drivers are old.
• A 3 year warranty!
• The dual stick/mouse unit has a third button which is set to paste in KDE. Not bad.
• The encapsulating case is actually metal, not plastic. I haven’t seen that since my beloved 6400!

The Bad:

• The wireless is a crappy Broadcom 43xxx card, and that’s all that offered.
• The trackpad/nib mouse combo – if you do not disable the PS/2 access for it, you will forever be losing it and having your HD churn while kprints take up your dmesg buffer.
• Different keyboard map, again. This one is more true to my circa-2006ish Inspiron 6400, but I am now used to Delete being the upper-right key, not Page Up.
• Speakers are immediately to the left, and right of the keyboard. Rest your hands a bit offset? Prepare for muffled sound.
• Yet another new, and seemingly-pointless AC adaptor. This one mimmics Apple’s 2003 technology with an LED by the plug – but it doesn’t actually do anything. It lights when it’s plugged into AC; it does NOTHING differently when plugged/unplugged from the unit. No, it won’t even recognize a PA-10 or PA-12 unit, so you can toss out your old adapters.
• The SSD is nearly impossible to use. Unless you have two cards, that is. You need to press one card into the butt of the other – a good cm into the recesses of the unit to get it to eject, or lock into place.

The Ugly:

• Audio is HDA Intel G45 based; ALSA is still sketchy with 1.0.18. It pops, it hisses, it is weak and fairly annoying to get working.
• Wireless, again. This is easily exchanged with two screw removals (including the one retaining the mini-pcie card, but it’s quarter-height. I’m working around this by having my 4965AGN in the Cell slot (perfect fit), but I have lost my leds.
• I personally find no use in the backlit keyboard (I opted out of the pointless thumbprint sensor).

It also has an automatic level sensor you can enable in bios to turn up/down the LCD’s backlight with different light levels. I turned this on as a test, but will probably disable it whenever I reboot. Less than a week old and the damn thing’s already whining when I get a mostly-white screen.

The resolution is wonderful, and although I opted for the Intel G45 onboard (only ATI was offered with his model, not NVidia for some reason), I don’t play games, and I do get a rather crappy ~300fps with this screen, where my prior-gen Inspiron 1525 does about 500fps with it’s Intel onboard – however, I do also have nearly double the resolution.

The 7200 RPM HD is pretty speedy, and the unit is not prone to overheating; but it’s also double the cost for roughly the same machine as my Inspiron 1525 with a better HD and better screen resolution with crappier hardware support in Linux. I do not regret my decision, but if I didn’t absolutely need widescreen, I’d stick to a cheaper machine.