Dell Latitude D505 review

The arrival of Intel's Celeron M chip - as debuted in the Hi-Grade Notino M300 - means that you really can get bells, whistles and adequate performance in a sub-£1,000 business notebook. The difference between this Latitude and the Labs-winning Inspiron 510m is that it promises compatibility with the Latitude's docking stations and stability when it comes to disk images.

This version of the D505 includes a low-cost 1.2GHz version of the chip, along with 256MB of DDR RAM, to achieve an overall score of 0.95 in our real-world tests. While good enough for day-to-day tasks, this is some way behind many current notebooks, even from Dell itself.

It zipped through office tasks with relative ease, but its weaknesses became clear when running graphics and multimedia applications. Its poor graphics performance isn't just limited to 2D either, as when faced with 3DMark2001 SE the Intel 855 graphics chip managed a meagre score of 2,176. This means it won't run last year's graphics-intensive games, let alone this year's.

The 855 chip is more than capable of producing smooth DVD playback, though, and the 14.1in screen is bright and reproduced colours effectively. However, we weren't overly impressed by how it handled text, as characters appeared a tad fuzzy.

Given its strengths are in office duties rather than multimedia, the Latitude's 30GB hard disk is more than enough. Should this run out, though, there's a combo drive for extra storage; otherwise, a DVD writer will cost another £141.

You could also back up data onto a network thanks to the 10/100 and 802.11b wireless Ethernet adaptors. We were surprised to see Bluetooth as standard, and this can be put to good use with a suitable phone. There's also a modem, as well as infrared, serial, parallel, VGA and S-Video ports. We were disappointed to find just two USB 2 ports at the back (especially given the lack of PS/2 ports), although a mini-FireWire port and PC Card slot make up for this.

The rest of the chassis is practically flawless. Using a tough grey plastic, it looks both business-like and stylish, and doesn't creak or crack when bent. The full-sized keyboard is very well designed too, and has enough give to feel very natural to type on. The touchpad could be bigger, but it's still comfortable to use. It's also a reasonably portable machine at 2.63kg, and the four-hour battery life under light use makes it ideal for work on the move.

With this, Windows XP Professional, looks and build quality all in its favour, the D505 is a great choice if you're after a portable business notebook for less than £1,000 - especially if your business already owns Latitude D series machines (although make sure you use E-Value code LAT-PCPROLAT when you order). The main reasons we hesitate to recommend it outright are the mediocre screen and that Hi-Grade's Notino is better specified but costs less.

Author: Mark Walsh