Dell Latitude E5550 Notebook Review

[tj]

USB ports + docking station
-------------------------------------
the two rear USB ports are disabled when docked. Them you only have one remaining USB on the laptop.
If you use USB dongles (mouse, headset, keyboard, hardware keys etc.) and you are using a docking staion DO NOT BUY THIS, it is soooo annoying when you have to move all your dongles from laptop ports to the ports on docking station enerytime you dock/undock...
grrrrr

[Jan Pochop]

Hi, when will you review the e5570?  Thank you

[Apostolos Chatzidiavatis]

m-Sata DOES NOT exist, despite what the specs were mentioning (store specs, not dell specs since dell has millions of models with the same name: e5550 thus not applicable).

It came with ubuntu 15.04 image to install. First of all Legacy boot didn't work, thus other distributions cannot be installed.

-- Wifi malfunctioned: Reconnecting each 5 seconds.
-- Usb after some time not detected.

Installed 16.10:

-- HDMI not detecting external screens. I tried a lot of workarounds from askubuntu and other forums, didn't manage to solve the issue.

I am not going to buy anything else from dell any more.

[Arthur]

I bought a Dell Latitude E5550/5550, three months ago, mainly because of the positive reviews on the internet.  Having intensively used it now for all this time I can tell you that I am UNhappy with it.  It is a step back from most other laptops I have used over my life (about seven).  Long story short:  don't buy this piece of ...

It has mediocre power, mediocre battery life, instable OS, and feels not solid.  Just stay away from it.  It is wholly different from a Dell that I owned over ten years ago and which was good.  I am very disappointed.

[IhateDellLatitudee5550]

DO NOT BUY IT!
I was given one for work. Man, this is the slowest computer I ever used. and I have been very happy with my Thinkpad for 3 years.
Not only the speed is unbearably slow, the weight is also something that I cannot stand. Close to 6 lb. For comparison, my carry-on is only 12 lb. Bottom line, do not buy it either for personal use or business use.

[Aces]

Meanwhile in 2022....

As an IT technician I refurbish a lot of laptops (properly, not the slap-dash way of the large companies) and its not too often corpo level laptops come across my workbench and I got curious about it. What people say is true, its slow, HOWEVER after fully refurbing the unit and doing the below its actually quite snappy.

- Replace CPU thermal materials, and add a 6w thermal pad for the IGPU.
- Replace HDD with SSD
- Update system firmware to the latest
- Upgrade system memory to 8\16GB dual channel DDR3 1600

Those changes will give quite a shot in the arm to the system making it rather good even in 2022 for most duties, the one thing I still don't like however is that there isn't an option to assign how much memory the IGPU has access to, in a system with 8GB RAM or more this should be 512MB or 1GB but as far as I can tell on the E5550 only a laughably pathetic (even for 2014) 128MB is allocated with no way to change this. Overall with the above changes the laptop is a nice cheap well running recycle job for 2022 in most tasks and even now unless there is some kind of dynamic memory allocation up to 1GB for the IGPU Dell should release a firmware giving the user the option to selected allocated memory sizes from 256MB up to 1GB.