Dell Latitude E6520

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The bigger your company, the more important it is to choose the right laptops for your employees. If you own or work for a big business (one with 500 employees or more), your laptop needs are likely very different than if you worked at a small or medium-size one—no matter how big the goals are. The security of sensitive data might top your list of concerns, followed by minimizing expenses across a big fleet of notebooks. Only third on that list might be getting the optimal features and performance for any one user's needs, given the impossible-to-reconcile needs of hundreds of employees. Dell addresses all of these criteria with the Latitude E6520, making for a solid platform that works for IT managers and employees alike.

The "minimizing expenses" part is usually not negotiable, and one way to do that in a big-company environment is to offer support for lots of interchangeable parts. (Think of the laptop equivalent of Mr. Potato Head.) Dell's Latitude E Series offers this, with no fewer than eight models to choose from, each with a plethora of configuration options. The $1,925 Latitude E6520 model that Dell sent us to test represents only one of many possible permutations.

This particular model has a starting price of $1,334 and offers a selection of Core i5 and Core i7 mobile processors, 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm hard drives up to 500GB (and some solid-state drives, too), and a couple of discrete graphics options. You can also add more-esoteric items such as an integrated fingerprint reader, a built-in contactless smart-card reader, or a multi-touch–capable touch screen. (Our unit didn’t have any of these.)

Other extra-cost choices include a number of extended-battery options and the ability to choose which hot-swappable peripherals (an optical drive, an extra battery such as dell INSPIRON 2600 battery, dell INSPIRON 2650 battery, dell 1G222 battery, dell BAT3151L8 battery, dell Latitude X300 battery, dell W0465 battery, dell Inspiron 2000 battery, dell Latitude LS battery, dell 2834T battery, dell 4834T battery, a second hard drive, or a USB 3.0 port) you want to populate the laptop’s E-Modular drive bay. (More on the bay later.) Enterprise users will appreciate the encrypted hard drive options and the large selection of wireless-LAN and mobile-broadband radios, as well as the Latitude E6520’s inclusion of Intel's vPro management technology. (vPro comes standard when you configure the Latitude E6520 on Dell’s online Large Enterprise store, but you can choose to not include it and shave a little off the laptop’s price.)

Overall, at least in our test configuration, this is a machine that's neither eminently portable nor a notable bargain. But it's well built, and for executives who won't travel much with their main machines, it delivers a very good performance argument if they need a bit of extra processing firepower and battery life on occasion.

The high price is our biggest criticism of the Dell Latitude E6520—it’s a bit too expensive compared with other, similar business-laptop offerings. The similarities between the Latitude E6520 and EliteBook 8560p don’t end with specs either. They both have rugged bodies and parts that claim to meet military standards, and they both come with software and services specific to the needs of enterprise-level business users.

Price notwithstanding, the Latitude E6520 is a solid business laptop with long battery life, speedy performance, and strong enterprise-friendly features. Depending on how you configure it, you can knock down the price somewhat. And if the Dell Instant Savings gods are looking favorably down upon you, you might see even lower prices at any given time you shop Dell's site. Our configuration came from Dell’s Large Enterprise online store, but a nearly identical configuration from Dell’s Small and Medium Business online store was $1,552 (after a whopping $482 "instant savings") at the time of this review, which would make it a proportionally better deal. It pays to shop around—as experience has shown, even in different places on the Dell site.