7. What The Future Holds

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Our sample Dell notebook with the 64 MB NVIDIA GeForce4 Go.

A question that you may have by now is, "What is a Final Engineering Sample Notebook?"; The easy way to answer this question is that this notebook is the final release version of the notebook before the company starts mass production based on a unit. In the case of this unit, it was neither a Latitude nor an Inspiron. Although you will notice the name Latitude on the outside of the case, it is really a combination of the two notebooks that Dell is releasing, which are the Latitude C840 and the Inspiron 8200. Elements from each of these products made up our test unit. We can learn a lot by looking at this sample, though what we saw in our look at this unit may vary from the final units that Dell chooses to ship.

When first looking at the the Dell Engineering Final Engineering Sample Notebook, right off the bat you will notice that it does, in fact, look at lot like the Latitude C810 and the Inspiron 8100. These observations would not be far off the mark, as the majority of the plastics that make up the outside of this notebook were taken directly from those systems, with very little change. Of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but we might like to see Dell make some additional updates to the outside looks in the next revisions of the product.

Our test notebook features the Intel Pentium 4m at 1.7 GHz. The unit also features the Intel i845MP chipset. It accepts two SO-DDR SDRAM in a PC2100/266MHz configuration. It can be configured to accept up to 1 GB of RAM. Our test unit features use of Dell's innovative heat pipe cooling solutions for both the processor and the GeForce4 Go GPU. Like the C810/8100, two fans in the back are used to remove heat from the unit. At times, these fans can be a little loud, but they are varible speed and they were not as loud as we have seen on others.