Dell Latitude D410

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Dell Latitude D410

Niketu Shah, Jul 11, 2005 1933 hrs IST

Going by current standards, the D410 severely lacks some of the basic peripherals required in computing.

Impressive specs, Sheer performance, 3-year warranty, Good battery life.

Restrictive Keyboard, Bad pointing devices and their meddling extra buttons, Expensive.

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Going by current standards, the D410 severely lacks some of the basic peripherals required in computing. A floppy drive or some optical drive at least should be built-in. Nonetheless, the D410 comes with an external CD-RW cum DVD combo drive which features a proprietary customized USB interface - the External Dell D/Bay. So you can't use it with any other PC. The external drive seemed pretty efficient though. It could read anything that you could feed inside its tray. It even read scratched DVDs and CDs too. And it also doubled up as a CD Writer. Max write speed 24X. Just enough.

The D410 is equipped with a rather soft and responsive yet cramped keyboard. The keyboard features all the regular keys but in dual or triple function format. The entire numerical pad is coupled with the alphabetical keys. Using these can be quite a sore effort, which was incidentally my experience too. It doesn't matter if you have small or big fingers, the keys aren't comfortable to 'find' and ' hit on'.

But the most annoying feature was providing another set of left and right mouse buttons. More than their presence, it was their location that was the cause of the pain. Well, these two buttons are located exactly below and parallel to the space bar. What's the trouble, you ask? Say, you have to type something in Word, and of course you would keep spaces between your words, now won't you? And every time you press the space bar thinking it is the space bar, and happen to hit either the left or the right mouse button, what do you get. Lots of wasted hours writing out a simple document. And, there is no option to disable them too.

But on the brighter side, a nice thing that Dell did was to provide two pointing devices - a Touch Pad and a Track Stick. Both perform decently enough with the track stick being faster than the track pad. That's what IBM has been building since years into their laptops. And yet this track stick can't 'click' on any buttons easily. Ideally it should, but here it did with great effort and a steady finger. The track pad doesn't have such nuisances though. It is the smooth operator amongst the two. However some of my colleagues who were used to the touch stick, preferred that to the touch pad. So I guess it's a matter of individual preference.