Meet Matt, a senior technician here at Laptop Broker. Like all our technicians, Matt knows his way around a laptop and has upgraded and rebuilt thousands of computers over the years. We asked Matt to review a few laptops he is familiar with and have posted them for our customers to review. We hope you find this information helpful and welcome your feedback.

Dell Latitude D830 Review

Dell Latitude D830 is a revised and impressive successor to Latitude D820. This notebook offers many customizable options. It is specially designed to offer greater mobility, improved performance levels, and a longer battery life. This is in tune with the growing needs of businesses and economies of the twenty-first century. Latest Intel processors and next generation wireless technologies in Dell Latitude D830 offer the required durability and reliability.

Dell Latitude D830 weighs six pounds. Although this is a sleek model, it is not very lightweight. Six pounds is more on the upper side limit of a thin and lightweight model. This laptop offers all essentials like biometric security, integrated WAN, wide-screen, Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and high processor speed. This is the perfect choice of laptop for people seeking a powerful and well-rounded portable for occasional travel. It is among the fastest Core 2 Duo machines.

Advanced hard drive choices of Dell Latitude D830 include Solid State Drives (SSD), encrypted hard drive, Intel turbo memory, and many hybrid drives. However, hybrid and SSD drives will be offered later and not initially.

This laptop comes with a complete printed document containing all details of the essential procedures to start your laptop. This document is available in many languages. You can choose to read and understand from the language of your choice.

Features

Dell Latitude D830 is a 15.4" wide-screen notebook using the Intel Santa Rosa platform. It offers the latest Intel Core 2 Duo Processor with 2.0 GHz processor speed. It has an in-built 2GB RAM memory and can support 4 GB RAM maximum memory. The hard drive size is 80 GB and speed is 7200RPM. The operating system is Windows Vista Business OEM. It has a twelve-month manufacturer warranty.

Dell Latitude D830 has a solid appearance. It is metallic graphite in color on the outside. The outer cover is made up of magnesium alloy while the inner surfaces are of plastic. The overall build quality is good, although it may not be a super build.  

Dell Latitude D830 has a modular media bay. You can remove the CD-RW/ DVD-ROM combo drive. This allows you to change the drives or exchange it for other upgraded units.

Rating: 4/5

The Internal Looks and Features

Dell Latitude D830 has a clean and planned look on the inside. The optical drive and USB ports are on the right side while microphone and headset jacks, PC card and Express Card slots, air vent, IEEE 1394 port, and WiFi-catcher are on the left side.

S-video, Ethernet, serial, power, and VGA ports, modem, and USB ports are at the back of the notebook. Docking port, battery, fan vent, and memory cover are at the bottom of your laptop. The overall internal design is simple and functional. The two-tone color scheme is very appealing. This adds to appearance of the laptop.

USB 2.0 supports fast transfer of data between peripherals. The Fire Wire port of this laptop connects you to many digital video cameras for rapid upload of data to the notebook hard drive.

Rating: 5/5

Keyboard and Touch Pad

The keyboard of Dell Latitude D830 is similar to that of other Dell keyboards. Keyboard is attached lightly to the case. Typing is comfortable and a pleasure. Keys offer easy operation and you can type at considerable speed. You do not have to hit hard on the keys; rather, minimum effort is fine. Overall, it is a normal keyboard and there is nothing exceptional to it.

Track point is very pressure-sensitive. There could be many unintended clicks. Changing mouse pointer speed with track point is difficult. It is not very ergonomically designed.

The touch pad of Dell Latitude D830 is easy to use and very responsive. There are buttons under the touch pad. These require just a soft click. Wide touch pad allows for easy movements. There is a fingerprint reader in between buttons of touch pad.

A slide switch on the side activates the WLAN. There are only three multimedia buttons on the laptop. These control the volume of the speaker as high, low, and mute.

Rating: 4/5

Screen

The screen of Dell Latitude D830 is much better than that of D820. The screen is bright and spreads sufficient light. The horizontal viewing angle is good while the vertical viewing angle is insufficient and poor. Vertical area of operation is very narrow.

Different display versions of Dell Latitude D830 include the base version of 1280x800, 1680x1050 WSXGA+ panel, and WUXGA display with resolution of 1920x1200 pixels. Display surface could be matt or reflecting Ultra Sharp.

The colors or brightness of the screen do not show any fading. There is light leakage at the bottom of the screen. However, this does not affect your functioning. You need to adjust the resolution to suit your viewing and working requirements. Outdoor usage could prove to be a problem as screen brightness declines to the top. Normally matt display has good and maximum brightness.

Rating: 3/5

Sound, Heat, and Noise

The speakers of Dell Latitude D830 are good. These speakers are on either side of the laptop. Sound emanates clearly and carries along well. The sound can spread well into the entire room. However, sound quality at very high volumes is fuzzy. Yet, overall speaker quality is good.

Normal work on Dell Latitude D830 does not heat up your laptop. Palm rest and keyboard remain at room temperature. Only the upper half of your laptop is little warm. However, if you are working on many applications, this becomes uncomfortably warm. Although the fan does do an appreciable job, yet, it is not sufficient. Laptop bottom and air coming from behind are warm.

Dell Latitude D830 is not a quiet laptop. The built-in fan starts running at high-speed during video encoding or benchmarking. This generates considerable noise and could prove disturbing at times. Optical drive also generates noise while working.

Rating: 3/5

Battery Life

Dell Latitude D830 comes with a nine-cell battery. It normally offers three to four hours of running life. However, your battery life is very much dependent on the applications your use.  

The battery has a runtime of two hours under full load and more than four hours during WLAN. The battery can deliver nine hours of running time with optimized energy settings and without any load. Optimized energy settings include LAN off, energy saving mode, minimum brightness, WLAN and Bluetooth off.

Rating: 5/5

Software

Dell Latitude D830 offers basic word processing software. You have to upgrade software to suit your requirements. If you use many graphic intensive applications like DVD playback, texture-rich games, and video editing, it might cause inconvenience if on shared video RAM.

Rating: 3/5

Wireless

Dell Latitude D830 has a new Dell wireless 5720 EV-DO Rev with built-in mobile broadband mini card. This allows easy and fast download and upload speeds with Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and TELUS. You can make your choice from a variety of Intel Turbo Memory cache cards.

Rating: 5/5

Overall Conclusions

The overall rating of Dell Latitude D830 is good. This laptop has most of the requirements essential in a reasonable business notebook. The magnesium case proves durable and robust. It is also indestructible and the design looks very business-like. All input devices are very user-friendly and do not cause any major problems even if you work for long hours.

The clear layout of keyboard and user-friendly touch pad are very impressive. You can choose the display version you need for your laptop. This is a major plus point. However, screen illumination is not very impressive due to decreasing brightness at the top of the screen. Performance levels of Dell Latitude D830 are appreciable. Battery life is another appreciable factor. 

Dell Latitude series are very impressive. Graphics are good and remarkable. Although the comparison statistics with other laptops may not be very interesting, yet, it goes to prove that Dell does not make only cheap and low-end computers. Dell Company also produces quality laptops that come at appropriate prices.

Pros:

• Good performance
• Solid construction
• Good appeal

Cons:

• Light Leakage
• Expensive
• Not very thin and lightweight