Why the Latitude L400

I have a 3-year old Pico Consul which currently runs Red Hat 6.2 and, very occasionally, Windows 95. The machine was excellent value when I got it (I had a limited budget, though I didn't pay for it out of my own pocket), but it is too heavy and flimsy to be a reasonable travel companion. Also, although all of the hardware is supported under Linux, some of it had a tendency to be flaky. I've been lucky: I know a few people with similar machines, and all have had a major hardware failure. When I got a grant for a new laptop, I decided that I wanted the following attributes:

Light (<2 kg).
Physically robust, well made, high quality components
Excellent support for Linux. It helps if the laptop is from one of the big companies, since a larger user base means a higher chance that someone has figured out the machine's idiosyncrasies
Reasonably good battery life
Trackpad rather than pointing stick - I've tried the latter, and I simply can't control them. This ruled out excellent alternatives from IBM and HP

I drew up a shortlist of Dell Latitude L400, Fujitsu-Siemens S4546, and Compaq M300. I was put off the Compaq by the fact that the normal battery is tiny, and one needs an external pack to get decent autonomy. The Fujitsu looks excellent on paper, as it alone had space for an internal drive, which could also accommodate an extra battery. However, I had heard of reports of hardware failure (including the one page dedicated to the S4546 on the Linux Laptop website). The Dell, on the other hand, had exemplary reports for its physical robustness and its Linux-friendliness, though the salespeople at Dell were surprisingly ignorant about Linux.

The machine doubles as my home work station, and on the road I use it for ad hoc number crunching (Fortran, Matlab + clones, Gnuplot), writing documents (Lyx, Latex, word processors when I have to), and giving presentations (so far, Staroffice and Ovation, though in consideration for my collaborators I will be switching to Powerpoint). My favourite desktop environments are Windowmaker and KDE, and I'm a long-standing emacs veteran.

First impressions

At the time of writing, I've only had the machine for three days, so it may seem a little premature to express opinions about it. Nevertheless: I'm very happy (so far) with it. It's light and compact and the metallic top looks as though it will do a good job protecting the screen from damage. The keyboard is firm and positive, and I find the reduced size quite usable (though someone with fatter fingers may have problems). Performance is excellent - this is the first machine on which I've found KDE 2 and Mozilla to be usable. The inbuilt speaker is pathetic (and, more worrying, I can't find a way to disable it), but if you plug headphones or external speakers into the headphone jack the sound quality is not bad, both under Linux and Windows. The manufacturer's claim of 2.5 hours from the battery seems believable, though I only got about 2 hours when running some very disk-intensive applications. The one real disappointment I have with this hardware is that the touchpad hardware doesn't seem to support multi-finger taps. Also, who was the idiot at Dell who decided that `fn-a' should be the hotkey to cause save-to-disk? The fn button is just next to the left cntrl button, so it's easy to waste a few minutes when one merely wanted to type `cntrl-a'.

Last modified 13 Oct 2001 by Stephen Cornell