For back story see: [Here], [Here], [Here], [Here] and [Here]  All these posts are about the trials and tribulations of ordering one single Dell Latitude E4200 laptop from Dell.

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My Dell Partner Direct Account Manager called me late yesterday afternoon.

This was further to my e-mail earlier in the day asking for lead time confirmation and to ask if the  costs had changed.

I was re-quoted and the E4200 was £115 more expensive but we soon resolved that.

The next stumbling block is the current lead time. As you can see from the above that’s up to 36 days on top of the 35 days that have passed since I placed my original order.

I was told the hold up is the 1.4Ghz CPU.

I had to be honest with my rep without throwing my weight around. I’m not prepared to wait 71 days for a laptop product that Dell offer on their web site when I can order one off the shelf from HP or Lenovo.

The demand for the E4200 was clearly started too early, in the UK at least.  It has been featured on the Dell business site as an orderable product since September 16th. I ordered one on the 17th but with a Delivery date in the late Novembers its all a bit vapourware for my liking.

Disheartened but still brand loyal I asked about the availability of the E4300’s but they too have a long lead time.

Earlier in the day I spent an hour or so doing real research into alternative products from other vendors like HP, Lenovo and Sony. Specifically their small form factor laptops in the 12.1” range.

Ill be honest HP 2710p below is getting pretty near top of my list.

If the 2710p came with a faster CPU 2nd generation SSD I would be giving it some serious thought.

As it stands I have a call in with Dell to see if we can work out a deal on a seed unit or something to tide me over.

One would imagine placing an order for a near top of the range business  laptop would be something Dell would be really keen to get right.

So last month when I saw they launched the Dell Latitude E4200 I immediately ordered one via my Dell Partner Direct Account Manager as I was in the market for a new business laptop.

I placed the order on the 17th of September and received an order confirmation the same day (pic below).

I was made aware that the Dell Latitude E4200 was getting a “Soft Launch” so I would have to wait until 21st October time frame. So I didn’t bother checking the online order status until earlier today only to find to my amazement my Order had been cancelled (See Main Picture).

Naturally I drop my Dell Partner Direct Account Manager an e-mail asking for clarification. The person covering my account managers issues confirms that the order was indeed cancelled but she did not know why?

27 days have passed since I placed my order, I am very confident I haven’t received any e-mail based notification of cancellation.

To date the closest I have got to a Dell Latitude E4200 is the picture below.

I ordered one, I gave payment details, I even got an order confirmation. What else do I have to do?

I find all of this rather disappointing and I know for a fact none of the procurement problems I  encountered would be acceptable to my Clients/Users.

At the time of writing It would appear if I want a Dell Latitude E4200 I have re-order it and start the process all over again or not as the case may be (a lot can happen in 27 days).

I really want to be blogging about how cool the E4200 is not how much of a headache it is to order one.

It can be difficult to disseminate what the difference is between these two types of storage  technologies available on Dell Laptops.

Both the 32GB and 64GB are available as “Ultra Performance”

While the Larger 128gb is described as “Dell Mobility Solid State Drive”

So what is the difference between the two types?

Over on the Direct 2 Dell Blog they claim this about the Ultra Performance model.

“Our labs benchmarked this drive in a Latitude notebook and saw a 35 percent overall system performance increase over a standard 2.5-inch 5400rpm notebook hard drive using SYSmark ‘07.  That’s even more impressive when you realize that the difference between standard 5400 rpm and performance 7200rpm drives (in the same generation) is 10 percent on average.  And just for fun, we did a shootout between the new SSD and a few desktop drives and, well, let’s just say that the performance gap is becoming a thing of the past.  Preliminary tests showed that this drive outperformed a 10,000 RPM desktop drive in overall system performance!”

Link: Direct 2 Dell SSD

So it seems the larger capacity but less expensive 128gb drive is based on the slightly slower technology.  I could do with some definitive confirmation of this - please use the comments.

It’s a Size Thing

So why not save some money and get the 32gb and utilise other external storage?

That’s all well in good and may be “do-able” for an average user but over the life of the machine I want some future proofing. No one knows for example the footprint size of Windows 7.

This choice between performance and capacity is a hard one for the consumer.

If you have any links or additional information on this topic please use the comments.

It was quite difficult to choose between the E4200 and E4300.

My instinct said the E4200 but my wallet said the E4300. However when it comes to investing in my own business tools I trust my instinct over my wallet.

As I recommend equipment to clients it’s important that I am confident in my recommendations and if I am going to recommend the E4200 to other people the best way to do that with confidence is to actually own one.

The key area of contention was the cost implication of going high performance SSD on the E4200.

I decided to get off the fence on SSD Technology and I elected for the higher performing 64gb model over the higher capacity less expensive 128gb.

To ease that pain I have a ton of external storage options. 32gb USB Keys,  external host powered 320gb Hard Disks and of course the Internet. So I can live with relatively low capacity of 64gb but benefit from higher performance.

As the CPU, Bus Speed and Cache are all low power I am hoping that the high performance SSD will balance things out and I can have the best of both worlds small form factor and fast performance.

So far so good, so I placed the order but the delivery date is 22nd October ish. So about 5 weeks from now. I wish Dell would sell things they can ship within a reasonable time frame (a week for example).

I do have some hope that the E4200 is going to be a "great little machine". but the decision between the E4200 and E4300 wasn’t easy.

If you want to read my future coverage of the Dell Latitude E4200 bookmark this (link)

Now that these new business laptops are available to order from Dell’s Web site choosing between these two models isn’t as easy as it would appear.

Form Factor:

The E4200 comes with a 12.1 inch screen running at 1280×800.

The E4300 comes with a 13.3 inch screen running at 1280×800.

So the only difference is the actual size of the form factor as the screen runs at the same resolution.

CPU:

The E4200 comes with the latest ultra low voltage SU9300 1.2Ghz or SU9400 1.4Ghz running on a 800mhz bus with 3mb of cache

The E4300 comes with the SP9300 2.26Ghz or SP9400 2.40Ghz running on a 1066mhz bus with 6mb of cache.

It would appear that the E4300 wins hands down in this category with Faster CPU, Bus Speed and bigger Cache.

Hard Disk:

The E4200 is only configurable with an  SSD hard disk at 32gb, 64gb and 128gb.

The E4300 is only configurable with traditional ATA/SATA hard disks with capacities of 80gb to 250gb

So if you want SSD you have to go E4200 if you want larger capacity then E4300.

Cost:

The entry level cost of the E4200 is £899 ex VAT and shipping

The entry level cost of the E4300 is £699 ex VAT and shipping.

The killer problem for the E4200 is the inclusion of SSD technology as this instantly adds £346 to go from 32gb to 128gb.

As you can see on the picture above it is cheaper to go for the 128gb SSD drive than the 64gb version. It appears the 64gb model may be a higher performance model than the 128gb which may explain the price difference.

I configured my ideal specification for each machine:-

The E4200 the cost was £1317 + VAT and Shipping.

The E4300 the cost was £888 + VAT and Shipping.

A difference of £429. The majority of which is the SSD hard disk in the E4200.

It is somewhat annoying at not being able to configure the E4200 with anything other than SSD.

I shall have a good hard think about this before deciding.

E4200 Link: Dell Latitude E4200

E4300 Link: Dell Latitude E4300