11. What Is A Final Engineering Sample?

On the right side of our test unit, you will find the removable hard drive tray. The tray on our test unit can handle up to a 12.5mm hard drive. Our unit was equipped with the 60 GB IBM 5400RPM Travelstar. As we have talked about in some of our previous reviews, hard drive performance is still a factor, but the Dell comes with the fastest hard drive currently available. We found the performance of the 60 GB Travelstar to still be pretty good when compared to some of the other hard drive solutions for notebooks that are currently available, but they all still lag behind the performance of your typical desktop system.

Dell has packed a lot into the right side of the unit. We removed the 60 GB 12.5mm hard drive from the unit, so that you could see how it slides back into our test unit.

Below the hard drive, you will find an Infrared port. Next to this, you will find two 32 bit Cardbus slots in a stacked configuration. Below these, you have 1394 Firewire port, Mic In, Head Phone Out, and Line Out. The Line Out can be reconfigured to provide digital out services via an option within the control panel. Also, you see one vent port that is used to help vent the heat from the processor.

The rear of our test unit has the following ports: Power In; PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse; VGA Out; C-Dock; LPT Printer; COM (Serial); and two USB ports. The C-Dock port is compatible with the C-Dock or C-Port Replicator devices that you already own. Of course, this provides additional value to those IT shops that are already using Dell notebooks within their enterprise.

The back of our test unit looks like the back of most modern notebooks in this class. The assortment of ports is standard. The two fan configuration on the unit is a little bit out of the ordinary, but serves it well.