14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that gaming notebooks aren't the only things that Dell is working on, as a recent bunch of Latitude series machines also got around to starting to sell through their maker's website.
It appears that Intel has surpassed or is close enough to surpassing all issues with its Sandy Bridge platform, as several Dell laptops based on it are now selling.
For those that need a reminder, Intel discovered, more than a few weeks ago, that its 6-Series of chipsets had a design flaw.
Said flaw caused SATA 3.0 Gbps ports to degrade over time and, thus, affected functionality of any motherboard or laptop built on it.
With so many thousands products halted and recalled, Intel had to make haste with its B3-stepping chipsets, fortunately managing to ship fixed models sooner instead of later.
This let its many partners resume shipments sooner as well, and Dell's own web store has now been updated with four Latitude notebooks that were actually revealed last month.
Known by their names of Latitude E5420 , E6420 , E5520 and E6520 (and priced at $1,193 to $1,334), they have second generation Intel Core processors at their heart, backed up by up to 8 GB of DDR3 memory.
A HDD of up to 500 GB handles the storage needs, unless the user decides on a faster SSD instead, though the capacity is limited to 128 GB in that case.
Furthermore, those that are not satisfied by the integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 can go for an NVIDIA NVS 4200M 512MB card (Optimus graphics switching is present).
The main difference between the 14-inch E5420 and E6420 and the 15.6-inch E5520 and E6520 is that the former have displays with resolutions of 1,366 x 768 or 1,600 x 900 pixels, while the latter have Full HD panels (1,920 x 1,080 pixels).
Finally, the E6420 and E6520 can be built with touchscreen panels and the operating system can be Windows 7, Windows Vista or Ubuntu 10.10.