Dell Latitude E4300 Review

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The E4300 is one of the most stylish business notebooks we’ve tested. The polycarbonate and aluminum chassis features a tastefully minimalist design with squared edges, with a handful of blue status lights dotting the top of the keyboard. Our review unit was black, but unlike most business notebooks, the E4300 is available in blue and red. The standard six-cell battery is a blemish on the uniform design, as it not only bulges out uncomfortably from the back, but also is painted in a mismatching silver.



With its lid closed, the E4300 measures 1 inch at its thinnest and 1.3 inches at its thickest points. With the optional battery slice attached to the bottom, the thickness increases dramatically to 2 inches at its thickest. The E4300 weighs a full 5.2 pounds with the slice attached, and 3.8 pounds without it. The Lenovo ThinkPad X300 and X301, by comparison, weigh only 3.3 and 3.4 pounds, respectively, when equipped with their six-cell batteries like dell KD476 battery, dell TD347 battery, dell Inspiron 1000 battery, dell Inspiron 2200 battery, dell 312-0292 battery, dell INSPIRON 2600 battery, dell INSPIRON 2650 battery, dell 1G222 battery, dell BAT3151L8 battery, dell Latitude X300 battery.

The E4300’s full-size keyboard has its keys in all the standard positions. Touch typists who like a highly tactile feel will prefer the Lenovo X300’s springy keys, but can still thrive with the E4300’s decent, if unremarkable, feedback.



Like its main competitor, the E4300 offers both a pointing stick and a touchpad. The tiny touchpad offers little surface area for movement, though tweaking its driver settings made it easy enough to navigate. The pointing stick affords greater accuracy, but its rubber nub is indented in a way that makes it both coarse and slippery at the same time. We found our finger slipping frequently as we tried to move around the desktop.

The 13.3-inch, LED-backlit display offers impressively bright, vibrant images and strong viewing angles. Watching a DVD of Star Wars: A New Hope, we were pleasantly surprised by the trueness of the blacks in outer space scenes and the brilliant fidelity of other colors like the blue sky over Tatooine or the gold metal on C-3PO’s chassis. At half-brightness, the screen was well illuminated; at 100 percent, it was overkill.

Like many 13.3-inch displays with 16:10 aspect ratios, the E4300’s screen has a native resolution of 1280 x 800. However, we would have preferred the larger workspace provided by a 1440 x 900-pixel resolution, something the E4300’s main competitors, the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 and X301, both offer.

The E4300 is equipped with an ambient light sensor, which is supposed to make subtle adjustments based on available light, raising the brightness in well-lit rooms to compete effectively with other light sources, while dimming the screen in darker locations to save battery life. Unfortunately, in several well-lit rooms, the hyperactive light sensor annoyed us by continuously raising and lowering the screen’s brightness every few seconds, even though we were sitting still and the overhead lights remained constant. In a darker room, the sensor calmed down and adjusted itself only once, but was still less useful than simply changing the brightness manually. Fortunately, deselecting a box in Dell’s control panel software disables the sensor, a choice we recommend.

Though marketed as a business system, the E4300 had better sound and video quality than many consumer notebooks we’ve tested. As stated above, DVD playback was incredibly smooth, with truly vibrant colors and sharp images and true blacks. Watching streaming high-def video on Fox.com produced similar results. When watching movies or listening to streaming music via Napster, the sound coming from the speakers was loud, clear, and free from distortion. We would most certainly recommend the E4300 for giving presentations to smaller groups.

The E4300 accommodates a couple of advanced interfaces, but as a trade-off, offers only two USB ports. The right side of the system features an optical drive, mic and headphone jacks, an ExpressCard/34 slot, a FireWire port, and the lone USB port. The left side has a Smart Card reader, a VGA-out port, and an eSATA port, which doubles as one of the USB ports. The front lip contains a memory card reader, while the back houses the Ethernet port. We appreciate the ability to connect to high-speed storage devices offered by the eSATA and FireWire ports, but we wish there was one additional USB connector.

Though the E4300 comes standard with Windows Vista, you can configure it with Windows XP, which is how our review unit arrived. Therefore, we were not able to run PCMark Vantage, our standard benchmark for today’s business systems. However, in the older PCMark05 benchmark, the E4300 and its 2.4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU scored a strong 5,787, well above our average of 3,714 for XP-powered notebooks.

For this kind of price, we would hope for a discrete graphics or switchable graphics option. However, the Latitude E4300 is available only with an integrated Intel GMA 4500HD graphics chip. The GMA 4500HD offered mixed performance results, returning a strong score of 2,210 in 3DMark03—600 points above our category average for ultraportable notebooks—while scoring a slightly below-average 775 on the more-demanding 3DMark06 test.

Not surprisingly, the E4300 did not fare well on our gaming test. On F.E.A.R., the system garnered a measly 24 fps at 800 x 600 and an unplayable 14 fps at its 1280 x 800 native resolution.