Dell Latitude D600 Report

OK, so I've been messing around with the Dell Latitude D600s for a while now. Figured now was as good a time as any to give my thoughts on them.

So far, they have been pretty solid laptops. They look good if not as cool as one of the newer Apples and are pretty well made. The deluxe leather case has plenty of room for all of the extra peripherals that you tend to need with the laptops as well as room for personal belongings. Could be a bit bigger, but you'd have to buy an aftermarket case for that. The latch on the front was hard to open at first on some of the bags, but once they have been opened a few times it gets easier.

The built in wireless works good, although (and I suspect this is the case for all wireless cards available right now) it takes a while (1-2 minutes) for the wireless card to connect to the network when the laptop is first switched on. For home users this won't be much of an issue, but for corporate users connecting to an NT or Active Directory domain, this is downright annoying. You either have to connect first thing using ethernet cable (kind of defeats the purpose of wireless doesn't it?), wait 1-2 minutes before logging into the system or log in, wait for the wireless to connect and then relog in.

Battery life is OK. They last about 3 hours on a single charge with moderate use. Probably not the greatest out there, but you can always get the second battery that goes in the media bay if you need longer life (of course then you can't play DVDs so you just can't win :D).

The 4 that I got all came with 1.7ghz Pentium M, 1400x1050 14" screen, 512MB memory (2 DIMMS), DVD player (1 system also got a CD-RW), Floppy Drive (primarily for ghosting, but also for legacy support), extra power adapter, optical mouse, usb keyboard (with built in 2 port USB hub), and deluxe leather case as stated above. Cost for each was about $2250 at our discount price.

Also got one D800 which is pretty much the same system but with a wider screen. One note of difference between the D600 and D800, the D800 requires a 95watt power adapter for best performance, but the D600 comes with a ~65watt power adapter, and interestingly enough, the car/ac adapter that came with the D800 was a 65watt unit as well. And of course when you boot up the D800 with the lower power adapter, you get a little error message during BIOS load. Cost for the D800 was about $2450 at our discount price.

Not much else to report. The systems run fast and aren't particularly hot. Plus the fan rarely comes on so they are pretty quiet as well.

If/when I have issues with them other than discussed above, I will post those here as well.

Comments

[Nicolas Grilly]

Hello,

My company purchased two Latitude D600 some days ago. I largely agree with your report. However the D600 deceived me because of two issues:

1) The left hand palm rest temperature is very high (around 34°C), because of the heat coming from the hard disk placed just under the palm rest. After an hour typing a document or a program, the heat becomes really annoying.

2) The SXGA (1400x1050) screen has a flickering and ghosting problem. For an example, visit the web site http://www.01net.com.

I'm interested to know if you found the same issues with your D600.

Thank you,

Nicolas.

[Alex Scoble]

No, I haven't noticed either problems yet with the 4 that I have purchased. You might have defective systems which certainly happens a bit with laptops. They are a bit more fragile than desktop systems just by virtue of the size of the components and the fact that they get moved around a lot more.

As far as ghosting, that's a problem that just about all LCD panels have. It's a factor of the speed at which individual pixels can be changed. LCD pixels change at a speed much slower than individual phosphors on a CRT monitor.

Although LCD panels are getting better. I really like the Dell UltraSharp 1901FP 19" flat panels.

[Alex Scoble]

Oh, I should mention however on the hard drives that I expressly ordered our D600s with the 5400RPM drives, so they might run cooler than the drives installed on your system. Doesn't make sense that a 5400RPM drive would run cooler than a 4200RPM drive, but it could be possible if the two drives are made by different manufacturers.

[Sharad Agrawal]

It has been three days since I received my Latitude D600. All works fine except battery life. For a centrino notebook, running XP + Outlook w/o network/lan (offlive) is giving 2 hrs - 2.5 Hrs.

Plus. Left palm is warm.

Can anyone guide about battery life on D600?

[Peter Menadue]

USB Problems with D600?

I have had troubles with the D600 and external drives (you know, the cheap USB2 external cases).

Dont know if it is the external USB controllers handshaking properly.
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=latit_periph&message.id=498

I also get occassional disconnects from my USB mouse...

[Alex Scoble]

I'm not sure if Lithium Ion batteries are the same in functionality as Ni-MH batteries, but Ni-MH batteries don't work to their fullest until they've been completely discharged and recharged a few times. You might try that.

Other than that, you can always get the second media bay battery.

[zayouna]

Hi

I just visit this site by accident,and found that you are talking about dell latitude d600,which I have the same kind,well I will be grateful if you answer me,my Q is my computer doesnt have a mini pci wireless card,but I red on d600 that it had it as a feature,I made a contact to dell service and asked the tech.,he said that it not a feature,so is this card already must be in or i have to purchase one, thank you for answer me. and which one is best there is too many kinds like dell intel and otheres.thanks

zayouna

[Ed Bolson]

I have been having hard disk problems with my laptop Latitude D600. it’s running windows 2000. when I boot it a message says primary disk none. I tried to boot from system disk and from CD win 2000. It says “no hard disk found” it seams to be a hard disk failure – hardware. Any suggestions? It’s 40 MB.

[John Foley]

I have several D800's and D600's running XP Pro. All of these are using the D-Dock and the Dell supplied USB mouse.

The USB mouse also stops responding several times a day on all these systems. It happens when connected through the dock but not when connected directly to the laptop.

Very frustrating for our users - phoned Dell who seemed totaly ignorant of this problem.

[srinivas]

Any info on the relative performance of the D600 vs the D800?

cheers

[riki]

hi there
i got this latitude d600, but the cooling fan is not running, i dont know whats the problem can you help me out with this please, and someone experienced the same problem

[Norb]

Hi riki,

the cooling fan is probably not running as it only depends on CPU temperature and that is probably below the threshhold. You can try fangui to check if the fan is ok, see http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/

I would like to add the Latitude 505 has same annoying handwarming feature - 39 degrees Celsius after doing some installations. This was with different hard disks (Samsung 7200rpm) which apparently were running at 47 degree celsius. Not as bad as apparently on some Latitude 600 models but still really irritating if you are using the keyboard a lot.

[Chris]

I have a few problems with mine. I use my machine in a corp. enviornment (little background...i run the helpdesk) and here are the issues I have discovered in time.

1) when disconnecting from power adapter, sometime the machine will not fire up on battery until the battery is removed and then placed back in. LAME, but eventually it works

2) On at least 3 machines 4 if we count mine the wireless card has a memory error and wireless does not work.

3) Machine will power down for no reason (battery or power supply).

[Paul Cooper]

I'm using a D600 and also find the Hand Warming feature very annoying, however of more concern is extreamly slow network speed when transfering data from the machine under Windows XP.

Has anyone else experienced this?

[Shawn]

I have had my D600 for about 5 months. It had been running smoothly until last week when I started to notice some random power shutdowns. It happened more frequently when I moved the laptop around. Sometimes, I needed to hold it at certain position in order to reboot. I called the Dell Customer Care yesterday and was told it could be due to either a defect screen or motherboard. They are sending a technician to service the unit today on site. Well, at least the service is very prompt and helpful. I'll keep you posted on the findings.

[Dean]

I have had my d600 for a few days and I find the heat ridiculous. Using the fan utility the HD temperature regularly is around 54deg. Is this too high? It is very uncomfortable. Is there any active cooling that I can employ?

[Shawn]

To follow up my post of Oct 20, I had to have motherboard and processor replaced in addition to LCD monitor (nothing wrong with the old monitor, but Dell replaced it anyways). I heard it was quite common for certain batches of D600s. I have no complaint about the Dell Support as I got a brand new LCD screen, new motherboard and processor, and the D600 has been running flawlessly since then.

[Alex Scoble]

To Dean: Yes, that does sound pretty high for the temp of a hard drive. That's more like the temp of a modern CPU.

All of the thinner laptops run pretty warm, especially with one of the faster hard drives (did you get a 7200rpm drive?).

If you think it's too hot, you can always call Dell. Hold times might be long, but you can usually get them to take care of you.

[Mark Curtis]

I have a Dell D600 laptop...I think that this might be a power issue, but I cannot seem to plug in a USB Hard Drive directly to the machine. It has been used on other laptops with greater power capabilities. It has been used on desktops. Do you think that this could be solved by using a USB Hub that consumes external power??

[angel castillo]

Hi, how do you doing, I have a Dell D600 laptop.

It Is posible connect two hard drives? somebody make this before? how to connect?

Do yuo can help me?

Thak you very much for the support

Best regards

Angel

[Thomas Stoltz]

Hi,

Instead of shutting down my D600 everytime I'm not using it, I like using the suspend button (fn+esc). Unfortunately, when I go into suspend mode I cannot use my wireless connection when I turn on the computer next time - I need to reboot in order to get internet access using the wireless lan reciever!

Anyone knows how to overcome this problem?

Cheers
Thomas Stoltz

[KBK]

Had anyone had problems with frequent hard drive failures on the D600 and D400 series laptops?

[Alex Scoble]

Hard drive failures are pretty common in my experience with all laptops. It's just the nature of the drives being smaller and less robust than larger desktop drives and the fact that laptops get moved around a lot even while the drive is running.

A 5-10% failure rate on drives in first 3 years is not uncommon with laptops.

So far though, I've had two drives die in D600s so that's a little higher than the usual curve, but then 6 laptops does not make for a great sample.

But yeah, in my experience, laptop hard drives die a lot more than desktop drives.

[KBK]

The reason I'm asking is that I work as a desktop tech for a large corporation. We have seen about 25 D400/D600 machines go down with hard drive failure. These are virtually brand new machines with only about 1 to 3 months of service. Dell says that this is not a significant enough number for them to look into. I think that's a crap excuse. But, we see it this way: out of 240 deployed D400s and D600s, 25 have bad hard drives after the first 3 months. I think that raises a red flag.

[Alex Scoble]

My question is, what if anything do you want Dell to do about that? Then of course the question is what will they do?

It's not like they are using different hard drives than anyone else. They primarily use Hitachi (formerly IBM) TravelStar drives, which for better or for worse are pretty much the industry standard.

I guess they could do more, like offering to replace all the laptop drives, but they would give you the same drive that has the same chance of failure, so that's not even a good option.

Maybe that particular batch of drives has something wonky with it similar to the IBM GXP75 drives that were dying left and right (the one my brother bought failed).

But I would say that your biggest beef is with Hitachi and not Dell, although Dell should work on your behalf to see that Hitachi's quality problems, if that is what they are, get fixed.

[Alex Scoble]

As a separate anecdote...I consulted at Portal a few years back and helped them deploy about 300 or so laptops (IBM 630 series if I remember correctly - they were Pentium 2 333s) and we had a similar hard drive failure rate within the first 6 months. So the number of failures that you are seeing isn't all that surprising to me, although it is unnacceptably high for this day and age.

[KBK]

Dell did replace all of those bad drives under warranty, without a problem. But, I just wanted Dell to investigate whether these drives were from a bad batch. A simple acknowledgement on their part would be a good gesture, since we buy their equipment in mass quantity. Hope we do not see more then we already have.

Alex, thanks for sharing your experience. I will visit this site again :)

[Alex Scoble]

It's my pleasure and thanks for visiting. :)

Yes, I agree that it wouldn't be a good thing if you had even more failures. I also agree that Dell could probably do more to make you and your company feel good about buying their products, but large companies that move a lot of product sometimes don't see the small things that hurt such companies because they are focused on the big "trends".

BTW when you brought the problem up with Dell, did you ask Tech Support or raise the problem with your sales rep? I find that usually when you complain to the sales rep, things get done, or better answers are given or at the very least they give a much smoother answer than "that isn't a significant enough number for us to look into it".

Of course, saying that, I hope it wasn't the sales rep that told you that.

[Jorge TBug]

i never had a laptop like this...the touch pad always stay freeze, the video play is very slow..with flickering, and i can prepare an egg, a meat on this laptop..it's too hot the left side, and is pealing off the cover..this is the worse computer ever made it by the dell...how can i process dell for this..? i want my money back...i'm serious.

[Dennis Johnson]

Flickering problem on the screen, especially for banner type stuff. Next time IBM

[Jim Brownlee]

I need to buy a new laptop in the next week, and I'm trying to decide between the IMB T42 and the Dell D600. When configured the same, the IBM is much more expensive ($2000 vs $1600 for the Dell) but it seems like the Dell has consistent problems. I'm an independent mgmt consultant, and I can't afford to be without my laptop, and I don't have an IT team for support. Should I spend the extra money for the IBM, or will the Dell get me by? Great thread - thanks for your thoughts.

[Alex Scoble]

Generally the Dell D600s are decent machines, but IBM and Toshiba are generally regarded as making more solid laptops.

My biggest suggestion is that whatever you do end up getting, at a minimum you get 3 years of next day on site support.

Should be noted that Dell offers accident support in the event that you drop your laptop or spill something on it. Last time I checked, IBM did not. Also, Dell support is generally regarded as best in the business for Windows PCs (according to Consumer Reports only Apple ranks higher based on customer satisfaction surveys they have done).

For certain things like hard drive failures, you have an equal chance of getting a bad drive from either company as they use the same hard drives. Hard drive failures are the only major problem that I've had with the Dell D600s so far.

If battery life is a big thing for you, probably the IBM is better. From everything that I've heard their battery life is excellent.

But I think for you the biggest factor is uptime, in which case I'd have to go with Dell just because their support offerings are better. If you buy as a small business customer, the support option you want is the 3 year Premium Business plan. That's the one that offers the accident "insurance". BTW that does not cover theft.