Dell Latitude D410 Review

Bought this laptop 2nd hand and in good condition off e-bay, so far i've had it for 6 weeks and I love it. The more i use it, more i adore it.

Next to the current range of netbooks the D410 is similar in size and weight, it feels just as good but at half the price of most new netbooks.

I have a 1.86ghz cpu this is faster than ones in any new netbook, upgrading ram, upgrading a hard drive to a bigger one is easy.

The D410 uses IDE hard drive which in August 2009 you can still buy and uses DDR2 PC4300 or DDR2 PC4200 ram.

The D410 can handle any thing I throw at it, outside the office or home its perfect as a portable PC. Its small, light, easy to hold, carry around and use.

Wifi is brilliant, this laptop can find any wifi in the area and stick with it at full speed.

Playing youtube vidoes via wifi, listening to music via the ear phone socket while working on 3-4 other documents is easy and D410 does it in style.

It can play computer games but I never tried to play modern games on it (as via an emulator I love playing games from ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64).

D410 comes pre-installed with Windows XP Pro but installing any other operating system including Ubuntu (Linux) or newer versions of Windows is straight forward and will work.

It has a 12.1 inch screen which is easy to use, its bright and pin sharp with good colours. Text is crisp and clear (infact I'm writing this review on it thats how good the screen is). Being a Dell its well made, it has a feel of quality, you feel you can trust it and computer repair shops can fix it.

You can buy plenty of spare parts for it including new batteries from 3rd parties at good non rip off prices. Best batteries to get are 6600mah or 7200mah which (depending on usage) last from 5-7 solid hrs.

You can go to Dell's website and down both service manuals and user manuals (very useful for upgrading or fixing the D410), The same website also has a good forum where you can get a lot of help from.

Keyboard feels like its a normal size, its good, solid and positive. Like all netbooks the D410 doesn't come with a CD drive but you can either use a 3rd party USB CD drive or you can buy an external CD drive from Dell.

The D410 only has 1 speaker (as it was originally designed for business users who had no need for stereo speakers) but it has phono socket so you can plug your MP3 player's head phones in to it and the sound is perfect.

According to Dell the D410 can use any accessory made for other Dell Latitude D series netbooks.

Overall if I needed a 2nd netbook I'd buy another D410 and I highly recommended it to anyone.