the laptop died this morning (in a shower of sparks – don’t ask) so been hunting around and found this – any body had any experience? Or any thoughts on similar models – ideally need the power lead and usb hole at the back as my youngest daughter tends to ram these in to the side of the chair

That links straight to the images can you link to the specs?

Have a Samsung laptop myself and am very pleased with it.

Just for You Soma_rich

It is worth shopping around. Have a look at http://www.itcsales.co.uk/acatalog/DELL_E6500_Series.html they take in Dell and others cancelled orders and returns. I just bought one of these after a lot of careful research (I treated myself to the LED screen and solid state hard drive but you don’t have to go that far!) and am very pleased. Mine hadn’t even been opened and has the full 3 year guarantee from Dell. I had resolved to get a thinkpad as they were so well built but the build quality of the current Latitude is probably as good if not better, magnesium shell, brilliant display and great keyboard.

One thing that is in vogue at the moment is shiny screens. I would avoid them if possible unless you like seeing what shirt you are wearing. These have a matt screen and are very good in all lighting conditions. By the way I get 6 hours out of the 9 cell battery that came with it!

Hope this helps

If you go Dell then avoid anything with the Nvidia 8400/8600 as the chips have a known fault in that they overheat and die!

The supposed ‘fix’ for those Dells was a bios update which just kept the fan on all the time.
Interestingly the new lot of Dells generally don’t use Nvidia gfx…

High gloss screens always need cleaning. Every tiny fleck of dust, finger prints etc show up much more on these.