Thema: Review Dell Latitude E5430 Notebook

[Redaktion]

A sense of balance. Dell’s newest 14-inch Latitude seeks a perfect balance of cost, practicality, and portability, bolstered most notably by its newfound optional Ivy Bridge chipset. Is the E5430 everything the budget-conscious businessperson has been waiting for?

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-E5430-Notebook.81765.0.html

[Jane Davey]

Very helpful, but I am still stuck with one question - every time I perform a function such as deleting an email, the laptop makes a very loud noise - any way I can turn this down or off?  Thanks

[hank robin]

  how to put the brightness down

[bob]

the e5430 has problems with fan noise:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/p/19480918/20289602.aspx

weird that this does not get mentioned here.

besides that, a BIOS update should hopefully fix it, but there is no information available from dell whether they intend to fix it.

[Steve Schardein]

That is indeed strange.  As you can see from our measurements above, although the noise levels under load were high, it wasn't very common that the notebook reached this point.  The idle levels were often nearly silent on our review unit, and most of the time the noise was more than tolerable.

It seems this may be an issue that only affects some E5430 notebooks.  From reading that thread, it does appear to be BIOS-related.  I am willing to bet that a future update resolves the problem for those affected.

Thanks for the feedback regardless.

[John Freed]

I have only had this unit two weeks. will not even start up and run programs.  Keeps rebooting and showing a PXE-E61 : Media test failure, check cable
all this machine knows how to do is reboot ad infinitedom

[Paulo]

I just got one, and it might be thick and "ugly" but inside is a super machine. HDMI, USB3.0, i5, DDR3 at 1666mhz..Really if you dont need to drag it with you all the time this is a great solution.

[Steve Schardein]

John,

Sounds like a failed hard drive to me.  It appears to be searching for a boot device and failing, then falling back on the LAN boot instead.  Try running diagnostics from the boot menu if you haven't already. 

[István Simon]

I bought this laptop few weeks ago. I think they worth it, and with the newest bios the cooler's sound isn't loud. The case has a good quality and the keyboard is very comfortable for long typing.