The best laptop of all time - Dell Latitude E6500.

I can already tell some of you Nerds are yelling at your screen. And what you're yelling is "TGHINK PAD" Well think pads can no longer be bought for ~200 PLN. And this machine is just as good as old thinkpads. It might be a stretch to say it's built like a tank, but the outside is indeed metal with as little scren wobble as my recently purchased (and currently lacking an OS) Asus TUF A16. I can however ASURE you, it's been designed like a fighter jet - slick and functional to the tiniest detail. I mean it. It's standard batteries had charge level indicators right on them. The IO, was actually conciously arranged such that you could aways grab it by it's sides, closest to you. Or at least as often as rules of probability of ports being used dictated, while stil using the ENTIRETY of the space given to fill it with IO. I'm gonna list all of it, starting with where your right hand would go when lifting as intended, then going arount the back and to the left hand: PCMCIA slot, Hot Swappable optical drive (only optical, it sadly doesn't have their earlier floppy connector inside), security card slot, wireless switch, mini firewire (1394) port, headphone jack jack socet, microphone socet, two USB 2.0 ports, modem, Ethernet, battery port, mini SIM card slot underneath the battery, DisplayPort (likely 1.1 or 1.1a), Power Supply connector, USB 2.0 port, eSATA/USB2.0 combo port, VGA port, a single vent, express card slot, SD card slot, hot swappable, 2.5 inch drive slot. All that and it also has a dock port on the bottom. A dock that I also have.



Because I know my frinds and the userbase of the site, I'm sure you were all business people in 2008 (/j) and I'm sure you're wondering. WHERE'S THE RS-232 SERIAL and LPT??? Rest assured the dock has them both AND a set of PS/2 ports. Also 2 more display oorts 2 DVI-I ports and a spare VGA, another eSATA, 3 more USB 2.0s, spare audio jacks and Ethernet cable and a modern life saver - a set of 2 USB 3.0 ports.



Internal I/O is also very cool. Problem with it is that while I know the wireless card is stuck on mini PCIe, and you get another such slot for adding another for dual band (2.4 and 5 GHz), as dos WPAN card (aka. Bluetooth), the standard for installing drives in them would not release till 2009, and I'm not paying to check, especially since mSATA which is what I'm reffering to is NOT M.2, and they are not compatible. Either way it means that while heeping the optical drive around, I only get one drive. Whcich means that for hot swapping, my best bet is to use a system that can live out of memory. This made my first linux experience happen on Puppy linux and while the most recent ubuntu version refusing to cooperate and previous one no longer able to download 32 bit support, I think when time comes to once again put system on it it's going to be Slacko. And the way things are going it's gonna have to hapen soon, I imagine.

Since I was already already talking about the internals - it takes DDR2 memory - up to 8GB at 800MHz on two sticks, which is hard to get and costs a good bit nowadays, but hey, it's a LOT for the day. Also the GPU is optional - in fact my first board didn't have it and used a bigger heat sink for the CPU. CPU wich is user swappable. The only options the machine ever got officially were dual cores, mine running at 2.8GHz and 6MB chache, but THEORITICALLY, with some tweaking it could maybe take a 2,26 GHz quadro with 12MB cache. wich would be the same clock speeds as the other CPU option at twice the core count and a power draw higher than the bigger one tough last time I checked not by much. Let's say I have creative ideas for it, but I'll need a second one before I take to doing ANYTHING and the replacement CPU is quite sought after. I didn't find photos of it's internals that'd convey what I want them to, and the layout, like with everything in it is very nice (just like the fact that yo uget to them by unscrewing one screw), so here is my actual machine:

^{Fun fact, in this configuration the GPU heat sink goes before the CPU one and has fewer fins, more spread out.}

But as we all know, none of that matters for most users, and no one cares beyond it being impressive to list. So what's the screen like? Unremarkable. Great for the time, better than a VA pannel """gamoing""" monitor I got a while back, but nothing amazing by today, other than it tilts back like 170 degrees, it can lay basically flat. It has no web cam, wich is an upside to me, personally. The touchpad? Smal and VERY insensitive in comparison to external mice. Saved by the fact the laptop also has a track point, together with double set of buttons. The spekers suck as well. But the keyboard? THE KEYBOARD IS INSANE. Especially for a laptop, it's the kind of rubber dome that could make some mechanical keyboard users question their decisions. Deep, satisfyng travely, with destinct tipping point on the dome, which - granted - isn't tied to the actuation point, but swich having borderline no resistance past that point it's not a big deal in my personal honest opinion. at the very least it outclasses any other laptop in the department. Also it's backlit, wich for 2008 is very notable. Too bad it has no numpad, it does however have a reasonable arrow key layout which is so rare I gave up on using it as criterium. The machine can also be optionally equiped with a fingerprint scanner, but needles to say, it's not even close to the power button.



Y'know what fuck it I'm even going to talk about the BIOS. It looks like word doc. It's also the deepest PC setup I've seen on any machine at all, and I've seen gaming board UEFI. Not all of it is usefull, and my first case of laptop not charging (or using the battery for that matter) was me not giving the machine a service tag after swapping the board, an action that might've cursed me with the issues that brought both the laptop I'm forced to use right now and the new one onto the warranty service.

BAsically what I'm trying to say - Old business machines fucking slap (they don't seem to make them like they used to *sipps monster ultra peach*). ThinkPads are great but my love is ultimately Dell. Even tho I got shafted with the very Vostro I'm using to write this, but I think its telling that Dell doesn't engage with AMD like at all, they don't seem to know how, and I made the choice to pick a version that used their CPU, in a consumer grade laptop no less.
Also I have like 0 idea where to put it, but I just found out not for the first time, I'm sure That my E6500 was made here, in Poland.

If You'd like to learn more, the article I stole most photos from is linked on my prifile via one of the 8x31 buttons. I COULD link it here, but I want you to have a reason to interact with my profile, I recently hit 3k views on it so I think people like to check it out too. The article goes into great detail on everything., so if this massive ramble got you interested by all means go check it out.