Dell Latitude D830

• Intel Core 2 Duo T7300, 2.00GHz
• 15.4 inch Wide Screen WUXGA LCD
• 2.0GB, DDR2-667 SDRAM, 2 DIMM
• 256MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M
• 80GB Hard Drive 9.5MM 7200RPM
• 90W AC Adapter
• 8X DVD+/-RW w/ Roxio Creator and Cyberlink
• Intel 4965 WLAN (802.11a/g/n)
• 9-Cell/85 WHr Primary Battery
• 6-Cell/48-WHr Modular Battery
• Vista Business, with media English
• Dimensions are 1.39" x 14.2" x 10.34"
• Weight is 6.5lbs with 9-cell battery and optical drive

When I first pulled the D830 out of its protective envelope boy was I impressed. Things have changed since the days of my 500m. I expected the build quality to be good, but it was unexpectedly good. It's really quite solid. It's also very pleasant to look at it; I think the rather subdued appearance is much nicer than the flashy white-bumper Inspiron.

The keyboard looks like a typical Dell keyboard; it's very similar in appearance to the keyboard on my 500m. I found that the keyboard is generally more pleasant to use; the keys have a slightly greater travel and a greater amount of feedback as well. There isn't any flex in the keyboard as far as I can tell, though I am not a terribly hard typist. Overall it's a decent keyboard, good, but nothing special.

The touchpad feels the same as the one on my 500m. It's responsive and easy to use, but again, nothing terribly special. I really like the buttons under the touchpad. Instead of having a short, hard click the D830 has buttons that have a longer, softer click to them which I just find to be rather nice. The same can be said for the power button and media buttons.

According to the various reviews I read, the D820 seemed to have a rather lacking screen and I was afraid this problem would carry over to the D830. Initially I felt that my fears had come true, but after further consideration and comparison, I find that the screen is quite nice, though it's certainly not perfect.

One of the first things I noticed when I turned on the computer was the unusually large amount of light leakage coming from the bottom of the screen.

One of the reasons I turned down the D630 was a that speaker quality was reported to be pretty bad. I usually use headphones when listening to movies or music but I'd like to have a decent set of speakers for the rare times I don't. That being said, the speakers on the D830 are pretty good as far as laptop speakers go. Being set on the sides of the keyboard means they are quite clear when I am sitting at machine and the sound carries itself pretty well even across the length of a living room. The sound does start getting fuzzy at really high volumes, but my ears usually start to ring before it gets to that point.

The single core AMD Barton processor in my desktop is clocked at 2.3GHz and I have not known it to really struggle with anything I threw at it. Subsequently I did not think I'd need the fastest processor I could get and went with the 2.0 GHz Intel T7300 because it was a nice round number. Recently I needed to do a fair amount of video encoding and I split the task between the D830 and my desktop. I daresay I was somewhat surprised as to how much faster the T7300 was compared to the older AMD processor. Encoding a certain video file was nearly twice as fast on the D830. I guess there's no doubt that multiple cores are the wave of the future.

I think the Latitude D830 is an excellent machine. Those who believe Dell only makes cheap, low end computers haven't seen one of their newer Latitude notebooks. Though its stats might not be as good as those of an XPS M1710 and its case may not be as good as that of a Thinkpad, the D830 is a high quality system with a high quality build and by all means a high quality notebook.