Reviews for Dell Latitude C600 Notebook

Work Horse

Strengths: Battery, Graphics, CPU, Upgradability.

Weakness: Mouse, Screen.

This laptop is one of the best I have ever owned. Despite its age, it holds up well when compared to many modern laptops. 8mb video ram is standard for most office machines, but due to the exellent CPU (mine can be downclocked to 701mhz and up to 850mhz) and the Mobility 128 8mb graphics card this laptop is capable of running World of Warcraft!
Internally it has two RAM slots, taking 144pin Sodimm (Laptop SDram in other words) and supports up to 512mb. It also has a single internal mini PCI slot, and headers for an internal wireless antenna, and RJ45 / RJ11 headers that run to the outside of the chassis.
Although I only have 196 mb ram in mine, it runs windows xp home, and can play Wow, Homeworld, Half life... all the classics.
Battery life is around 2.5 hours on full burn, but using the Intel Speedstep feature that can be increased enormously - my current record is 5 hours using the internet at a friends house without having to unpack the charger. Due to the design of the drive bay, a second battery can be added where the cd rom slots in, extending battery life even further.
The drive bay itself is highly modular. The laptop came with a CD Rom drive, but I have upgraded this myself so it now has a DVD-WR/R instead.
This laptop was originally meant as a corporate/office machine, and its lack of USB is understandable - it was made just on the dawn of the USB age, and its docking station had plenty. I myself use a PCMCIA usb2 card with no problems.
Its only letdowns really are the mouse and screen. The design of the mouse impacts the screen and has made a visible impression which can be annoying. The mouse pointer in the middle of the keyboard has a problem where keypresses around it cause it to 'spazz' around the screen. I solved this by removing the pointer assembly. No more mouse spazzing by a pointless device.

In all, this laptop can still outperform some newer laptops, and is a great classic gaming machine. I also use mine to watch movies across my network, since the massive internal antenna is great if you add in a wireless Nic.

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May have been great a LOOOONG time ago...

Strengths: It works?

Weakness: Battery CPU RAM HDD Video Card No Wireless in short, the whole computer.

This laptop was once top-of-line, but in today's world it is Model-T trying to compete with...anything else made in the last couple years. I got mine from Overstock.com used. Delivery was fairly quick, came with CD and Floppy drives, and a cable to use the Floppy Drive externally. Also came with power-brick, of course.
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The first thing I noticed was that it had screen damage, caused by the pointing stick (it comes with the nipple and a touchpad) and by the ridges around the top of touchpad. It wasn't TOO bad, but there are three noticable spots where the screen is permanently messed up. After w awhile, I found that you can pop off the pointing stick, which helps immensely.
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Next to give me trouble was the TouchPad. After a few days of use, it started flying off on its own and jumping around by itself (the onscreen-cursorm not the computer!). I could not control it, and always ended up doing a hard reboot to fix it. It got so bad I couldnt even type in my password at the login screen; it kept clicking by itself out of the text box. I eventually found a Driver/Application by Synaptics that fixed this, and found the problem was in the fact that both the touchpad and the Pointing Stick were activated at the same time. Turnining one off was the main solution. It stills gets a little jumpy occasioanlly, but nowehere near as bad as it used to be. I use an external USB mouse now.
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Speaking of USB, this thing has only ONE USB port. VERY bad! If it werent for the fact that my laptop-cooling pad has a pass-through USB plug, I would be screwed! This really limits how many peripherals you can have going. And believe me, after you use this for a while you will be scrounging up all the peripherals you can find becasue almost everything about it sucks badly.
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The laptop gets hot very easily. While it has a decent fan in the top right corner, it is either off or on, as far as I can tell. This means that watching movies (not on DVD, as it lacks a DVD player) will often get you new sound effects; the droning whirr of the laptop fan! It was so bad, I had to buy a cooling pad which plugs into the USB to keep the heat down.
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The keyboard also started to give up the ghost on me. At first, only a few keys stopped responding sporadically. Now, about 20% of the keyboard keys do not respond. I have done everything I can think of to fix it, short of removing the keyboard for cleaning or replacement. Instead, I pulled a keyboard off of a really old PC and use that, plugged into the PS/2 port. It works perfectly, minus the lack of a Windows button (the keyboard is almost twice as old as the laptop).
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I think the C600 came originally with 128MB of RAM. Thank god mine had 256 or I would have trashed this thing. 128 is NOT enough to do anything; I find myself using over 100 MB jsut from using FireFox and OpenOffic/MSWord at the same time. Unfortunately, it costs a fortune to get more RAM for this, since it needs a special type. I think I saw a 256MB stick on here for about $70. Might as well buy a better laptop.
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The 750MHz Pentium 3 is the only thing on this old donkey that has impressed me; for its age, it runs quite well. I do quite a bit of gaming, but this laptop limits me to old games like Diablo, Quake 2, Doom, etc. However, it works great for Internet browsing, my other hobby. I am limited my by my wireless connection in that department. I also like being able to run the Zune Windows theme without lag, somethign I was worried about.
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Anotehr thing to note is that it has no built-in Wireless internet. This means you have to buy a wireless card or find an Ethernet cable. I got one for $40, quite an investment for such a POS, in my opinion. (It does have an Ethernet/LAN port, though)
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My C600 was supposed to have a 20GB Hard Drive. Ofcourse, that it never exact and it comes to about 18 GB. I am quite a packrat, so this is not nearly enough for me. I send all my huge files to my other PC, which has a 220GB HD, and access them over the wireless card I bought. An externall hard drive is almost a neccessity if you plan to work with a lot of big files.
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The speakers are quite crappy, but useable. I prefer to hook up some headphones, but I really dont have any good ones. A long haedphones cord helps here.
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THe video card gives me the most grief. I thank Gad that mine actually came with one. However, it is an "ATI Mobility 128 AGP 2x". It has 8MB of memory. It is one step away from useless. Since this is a laptop, it cannot be upgraded. I could barely play MapleStory on this thing. At least GBA games run at 100%, but they can only be sped up to about 120%. Recently, I have been having trouble trying to get a dual monitor setup to work. However, the latest drivers from ATI do nothing and the card is not on the list of supported items. In short, I doubt that I will ever be able to get it working.
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Battery life is also not that great. I usually get about 30 minutes out of it when I am just typing things. That drops t

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Don't buy it.

Strengths: ummm...

Weakness: Lid hinges, slow, mouse, crashing, speakers

I am borrowing this laptop. It's, maybe, 2 years old. The lid won't even stay up. It falls backwards. The cursor often wanders around on it's own. It freezes about 2 times a week. The speakers are terrible, and if you plug in decent headphones, you'll hear a ton of "static" sounds and clicks (loudly, too). It heats up quickly. There is only one USB port and no slot for SD cards, etc. The wireless internet connection is off and on, while my other laptop doesn't have this problem. I can't put it on Standby mode because when you turn it back on, the image on the screen is cut off and repeated, then you can't use it until it's completely rebooted. I strongly suggest you find a better laptop to buy.

Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Don't buy it.

Strengths: ummm...

Weakness: Lid hinges, slow, mouse, crashing, speakers

I am borrowing this laptop. It's, maybe, 2 years old. The lid won't even stay up. It falls backwards. The cursor often wanders around on it's own. It freezes about 2 times a week. The speakers are terrible, and if you plug in decent headphones, you'll hear a ton of "static" sounds and clicks (loudly, too). It heats up quickly. There is only one USB port and no slot for SD cards, etc. The wireless internet connection is off and on, while my other laptop doesn't have this problem. I can't put it on Standby mode because when you turn it back on, the image on the screen is cut off and repeated, then you can't use it until it's completely rebooted. I strongly suggest you find a better laptop to buy.

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ReviewGist for Dell Latitude C600

Performance is Average according to 3 Notebook experts. -- "latest 850Mhz Mobile Pentium III SpeedStep processor"-vnunet.com Read more to find expert opinions on more features like Battery, Interface, Display, Multimedia, etc.

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