Product Reviews

Latitude is Dell's business brand of notebook, and that should give you a clear idea of what to expect from the new CPt C series. What you have here is Dell's take on a no-nonsense portable for the troops, combining a practical specification with a relatively moderate price tag, at least by corporate notebook standards.

The C-333GT has what might be called a classic modular design, with a multipurpose bay in the front edge of its case capable of holding either the floppy drive or the 24-speed CD-ROM player, or a variety of options including a second battery, an LS-120 superfloppy, a DVD-ROM drive or a second hard disk. As usual, the floppy drive can be taken out and run externally, and Dell has thoughtfully included the drive-to-parallel port cable in the standard package. You even get a blanking plate if you want to leave the bay empty to keep the weight to a minimum.

You might not need it, however, as this is a reasonably portable machine, weighing 3kg with its CD-ROM drive installed. This is all to the good, but a closer look at the build revealed that some of the weight saving has been at the expense of overall robustness. The actual quality of manufacture is fine, but the case mouldings are on the thin side, resulting in some flex in the main body and the palmrest, especially in the middle. For the same reason the lid has a yielding surface, despite strengthening ridges designed to prevent this.

The 4.3Gb IBM TravelStar hard disk, which will be upgraded to a 4.8Gb model in production versions, is removable and fixed by a single security screw, and the memory upgrade compartment can be opened without any tools at all. One of the two SODIMM sockets is empty, so increasing the standard 64Mb of memory will be a quick job. Ports are as you'd expect, with the standard I/O augmented by USB, infrared and an S-Video TV output, complete with a small RCA composite converter cable, plus a docking station/port replicator connector. Expansion is standard too, in the form of a stacked pair of Type II PC Card slots, both Card Bus, with Zoomed Video on the bottom slot.

Audio processing is done by a NeoMagic MagicMedia 256 audio chip, along with a software wavetable, which drives a pair of speakers set into the sides of the case up at the front. These are loud by notebook standards, and the sound produced is reasonably clear. This setup should make the audio element of presentations fairly painless, although I wouldn't recommend

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them for recreational music listening.

Dell has done its usual excellent job on the keyboard, which is everything a notebook keyboard should be but frequently isn't. The layout is spacious and logical, with the alphanumeric pad given the full width of the case. This provides room for decent-sized modifier and command keys, including a large Enter key, a full-sized Backspace and a long spacebar. No keys have disappeared, so there's no need for any Fn-plus-arrow key silliness to get at things like Home and End, and the action benefits from a pleasing combination of a fairly long travel and a distinct break.

I wasn't quite so enamoured with the screen. It's certainly big enough with its 14.1in diagonal, and it produced a comfortably readable 1,024 « 768 Windows Desktop as a result. Sadly, as is all too often the case, it wasn't very brightly lit. Even with the backlight cranked right up things were a bit gloomy, and if you decide to take it out in the sunshine you'll find it difficult to see anything at all. The NeoMagic graphics controller is kitted out with 4Mb of local memory, so you can run an external monitor at XGA resolution in 24-bit colour if you need to.

The review sample was supplied with a conservative and businesslike installation of Windows 95, but among the various Dell software utilities you get a power management controller that takes over the job from the standard Windows 95 applet. It gives you much the same functionality that you get with Windows 98 by providing you with a choice of preset power management settings. If these settings don't suit your needs, you can change the component inactivity timers individually yourself. The lithium ion battery should last for somewhere in the region of 2.5 hours if you don't push it too hard, and you do have the option of fitting a second battery if you really need the extra running time.

Performance was reasonable, with an overall benchmark result somewhat faster than a typical Pentium II/300-based portable, which seems to indicate that the Celeron/333 is doing its stuff. There's certainly no doubt that the Latitude is up to fulfilling its design brief, which is basically running the likes of Microsoft Office at an acceptable pace.

When the first models in the revamped Latitude range appeared in late 1997, Dell's corporate notebook received high praise from PC Pro for the simple reason that it offered one of the most innovative and elegant designs on the market. The vast majority of those key strengths, such as the excellent keyboard, comfortable typing position and lightweight design, are still present in the Latitude CPt C. But at the same time, notebook design and technology is moving on, and the likes of Sony and Toshiba are showing that with new materials it's possible to make smaller, thinner and lighter notebooks that don't sacrifice usability. The pricing remains extremely competitive, and the Latitude CPt C-333GT is still a very good notebook. However, the concerns over build mean that it's no longer the greatest.