Specifications

fails utterly. Every time I listen to a music track or movie the sound has no depth and it feels and sounds like

something is missing.

To try and get around this, I tried using the headphone jack on the D430 with a pair of Creative earphones

that are known to work well enough to my satisfaction on other machines. Even then, the D430′s sound

system disappointed so I know it is not just the lack of decent speakers. It is the lack of a better-than-low-

quality integrated sound card. Granted, a business person probably will not have much use for the

integrated speaker when making presentations, but I’m sure anyone would appreciate being able to listen to

music. Furthermore, if a user hooked this laptop up to an external speaker set for a presentation, that user

better not plan on using complex sounds and music clips. I just do not think this audio system would cut it.

The only interesting gripe I have is that the driver for the audio system seems to occasionally self-destruct. I

have had to reinstall the drivers five times since I started using the laptop, and all I ever did was reboot

occasionally and evaluate the computer. Fortunately, the drivers always seem to install automatically on the

next reboot. But this activity is annoying. (A friend recently suggested I install different audio codecs, so it is

possible that the drivers are sensitive to your codec packages. Any user with the Realtek C-Major Audio

system may want to keep that in mind.)

Dell, fix the speaker before you release an update to the D430. And fix the driver.

Processor and Performance

As an ultraportable machine, the D430 features Intel’s latest ULV (ultra low voltage) processors. They’re

designed from the ground up to run on a minimum amount of power, not output much heat, and performance

is definitely a secondary concern to battery life. Even more interesting is the ULV series is one of the few

Intel processors that still offer single-core processors that consume even less power.

The D430′s U1400 is the latest single-core ULV from Intel and consumes about 5.5W, whereas the latest

ULV dual-core U7600 consumes about 9W. More powerful processor means less battery life and more heat,

and these two reasons are exactly why I choose the U1400 over the U7600 when purchasing this notebook.

Ultraportable’s main concern is overall battery life and just getting those ‘relatively simple’ tasks done on the

fly without needing to carry around a bulkier notebook. One does not need a lot of power for the general

office tasks, which is what the D430 is marketed for.

Single-core processor? Is that not a pretty old (and almost obsolete) technology? For mainstream

notebooks, yes. But the D430′s single-core U1400 is definitely capable of performing to my satisfaction, and

a single-core processor is a perfect solution for extending the battery life.

Before any benchmarks were done, a fresh copy of XP was installed and the system updated. It was always

plugged in and set to the "Always ON" power profile.

PCMark05 is a synthetic benchmark that gives users a general idea of how powerful any processor is, and

the D430 came in with a final score of 1454. A little more optimization could probably have yielded a slightly

higher score, but one should expect to be within 100 points of this benchmark under most circumstances.

(view large image)

In addition to the raw PCMark score provided by the benchmark, the D430 has the following detailed ratings.

e 7 of 15Dell Latitude D430 User Review

4/26/2014htt

://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/dell-latitude-d430-use

-review