New Dell laptop

My old Lenovo T530 was getting a little long in the tooth now and I was in the market for a new work laptop.

Due to COVID19, the prices of hardware in New Zealand have been rising and I wanted to save the school some money by going second hand.

Even with second hand products, the choices are quite varied and I was able to pick from a variety of models. I had said in an earlier post that I was not going to choose anything with a U processor and non-removable battery in it, but I had to relegate on that decision as every single model I looked at had the U processor and non-removable battery in them.

I was influenced by Colin Percival’s choice of a Dell Latitude 7390 and it happened that it happened to be one of the choices on my shortlist. Like Colin, I was a little disappointed with the lack of RAM and the absence of a Trackpoint, but I was more than happy with the specifications given how much it costed.

When it arrived, I was pleasantly surprised by the difference in size (and weight) between a 15" and a 13". I had depended on an iPad for portability where jobs required some computing power on hand, but this difference was a game-changer.

Initially, I installed PopOS 20.04 as my main operating system with Windows running in KVM as a virtual machine. I later realised that with WSL2, it made more sense for me to do the exact opposite : run Windows 10 as the main OS and Linux as the virtual machine. Linux runs under a compatibility layer shim in Windows and thus does not exact a high performance penalty as any OS would under a Type 2 hypervisor. Furthermore, WSL2 has disk performance improvements when compared to WSL1, making the decision a no brainer.

Conclusion time. Was the Dell Latitude the right choice? A reserved yes. Much of my pet peeves with the device lies more with Linux compatibility with the device (especially Thunderbolt and dynamic wired Ethernet connections) and which on retrospect probably would have been solved if I had more persistence. It is a small, light and powerful laptop with good keytravel and an inbuilt Ethernet port. What more can a systems engineer ask for?