Anyone owned a Dell Latitude C400 Ultralight laptop?

[Draeger]

I've just bought one of these, used, in excellent condition. It was purchased on a car owners forum from a member who I have known for some time at a price I simply could not pass up on.

Anyway, its the Pentium III 866Mhz version. Its got 256Mb of memory and a 30Gb hard drive.

Has anyone owned one of these so called "Ultra portable" notebooks?.

How did you get on with it?. Any good?. Pro's/Con's?. I read a comment on another site that mentioned that the USB 1.1 port is not powered?. Could that be right? ( would be a bit strange if it was correct? ).

I'm envisaging using it networked through my router at home for word processing, surfing online, all pretty basic and light stuff.

Was also curious to find out if it will run any old games ok with its Intel 830 onboard graphics chip?. When I say old, yeah.......I'm not too optimistic on its performance, but I was thinking along the lines of the original Mech Commander, SWAT 2 etc, that sort of "era" of games, perhaps even a few DOS ones.

Any advice appreciated.

 

[huppy]

I have a C400 - am using it now in fact - and I find it great for what I use it for. It's a great size - small and light enough to sort of throw around as I move around the house, but large and functional enough to actually be a laptop and not an oversized PDA.

I've had it for around a year, though someone else at work was using it for a couple of years before I was given it. I use it mostly for web and application development, including intensive use of Visual Studio and Photoshop, among other applications. It does most things okay though I did have to stick some more memory in it to cope with larger photoshop images. I haven't ever tried any games on it though (except minesweeper ).

I think you'll be pleased with it, its portability, size and weight is absolutely fantastic, i think. I'll never go back to any larger laptop.

 

[Draeger]

Thanks for the input.

I'm looking forward to getting it on Friday, will report back with my thoughts on it.

*EDIT* You said you had to chuck some more memory in there, what was your C400 running with before you did that and how much have you got in there now?.

I'm thinking I will ditch the 256Mb stick and throw 2x 512Mb ones in there at some point.

 

[huppy]

It was running 512mb and i put in another 512mb to make it 1gb. It ran okay on 512mb but it was once i started chopping up photoshop images that it started thrashing the hard disk's pagefile. I guess it would depend on what you were doing with it, and how much image editing etc. you forecast yourself doing.

I'd recommend 2x512mb though

 

[Draeger]

Thanks for that.

Think I will upgrade to a Gb of memory. I'm only going to be using it for web browsing, MS word and powerpoint for work and maybe the odd old/retro game here and there, but extra memory would not go amiss I suppose.