Dell Latitude E4310

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crosscourt
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Dell Latitude E4310

Post by crosscourt »

Ended up with one and it has an i5 2.6ghz, 4gb of ram and a 13.3 display. Will add more ram and a SSD and run Linux on the system for now. Should be good for either work or for distro testing.
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crosscourt
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Re: Dell Latitude E4310

Post by crosscourt »

Will be dropped off on Thursday and Ill report back.
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Re: Dell Latitude E4310

Post by tlmiller »

This was really the first ultra-super mini laptop I ever used to any great extent (I used a few D420's, but never for more than a few minutes at a time). Not surprisingly, I remember these quite fondly, I was really impressed with how small and lightweight it was, yet still reasonably powerful, and so this was a big part of my losing interest in 15"+ laptops and my love of 13-14" laptops.
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Re: Dell Latitude E4310

Post by crosscourt »

I had the D420s and liked them and the recent E4300 which had some issues. Looking forward to using it as my Linux laptop and testing system.
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Re: Dell Latitude E4310

Post by crosscourt »

Bios updating was a bit more time consuming than I expected. My E4300s updated bios thru Win10 with no issues but that wasnt the case with the newer 4310. You first have to update to the A07 bios before you can update to the latest A15 bios. Problem is theres no A07 bios update that can be done with Win10 or Win7. I had to whip out Rufus and create a FreeDOS USB stick and then put the bios update on it. Reboot, type dir, spot the .exe file and off we go and it installed with no issues. Then back to Win10 and install the A15 bios and all done.
Not sure what they were thinking when the 4300 has no issues and the 4310 has to jump thru hoops.

The 4310 is a much faster laptop with its 2.67ghz Arrandale i5 versus the 4300 with its 2.5ghz core 2 Duo. Its very noticeable when installing, running apps and other tasks.

Tested a number of distros last night and one thing became clear, the 5.11 kernel doesnt work on the 4310. 5.10 though does but I had an issue with PCLinuxOS with the 5.11 kernel. Most of my distros are running 5.8 kernel.
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Re: Dell Latitude E4310

Post by crosscourt »

Linux runs great but cant get Win10 to install and activate. Ive got a valid Dell Win7 OS install and activated, then install Win10 and after two tries, it wont activate. The 4300s had no issues at all but the 4310 is a no go. Very odd laptop so far with all its little issues.
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Re: Dell Latitude E4310

Post by tlmiller »

The BIOS issue isn't all that surprising. That's very common for the legacy laptops, almost all the D-series had it that they had to have version xxx before you could upgrade to version yyy. And several in the xx20/30/40 series did that as well. Usually it was a fairly early BIOS though, that wasn't overly long after release, which A07 would support that, since most of that timeframe shipped with A02-A05 versions.
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Re: Dell Latitude E4310

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4310 has A15 bios but I ended up trying a Win10 product key I had from one of my other laptops and it worked. Win10 is now installed on the system and with Microsoft account I can reinstall it at will. As I said the 4300 had no issues at all but the newer 4310 did have issues, really odd.
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Re: Dell Latitude E4310

Post by crosscourt »

I cloned my Win10 install over to an Adata 240gb SSD and it runs very well. Im impressed with how well Win10 runs on such an old laptop.
Swapped out the wifi card to an Intel N card and went from 34mp[s to 119mbps the present limit on my internet connection.
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Re: Dell Latitude E4310

Post by wove »

I would like those network speeds. 12mbps is the limit of my internet connection. It is sufficient for our needs and well we are just too cheap to pay for more speed.
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