Latitude XT first impressions
Unfortunately I had a few meetings and other tasks to get to this morning so it took me a while to get some time with the machine. I made a Ghost image of the hard drive before I even did the first boot – good suggestion for anyone getting a new box.
But image done I now have had a chance to get the box up and running. My primary machine is a Dell Latitude D630 with a snappy SATA hard drive, 4GB of RAM, etc. According to Vista’s Experience Rating my machine is a 4.0 (not bad for a laptop).
The Latitude XT has a 5400rpm ATA hard drive which I was bummed to hear about at first since I’m losing transfer speed, etc. I was quite surprised to see the Experience Rating of the tablet is a 3.5 however. Not too shabby!
Typing seems pretty normal for the current Latitude keyboards so that’s nice. This is still a standard factory build so all the Google stuff is on there indexing and thrashing the drive – thanks. Still, everything seems pretty snappy so far. Might have to take this baby home and play with it some.
I’ve got a trip for a week-plus next week so I want to see if I can get happy enough with the box to take it with me. Sure would be nice to watch a movie on the tablet on the plane … good test of battery life that would be too. This has the 6-cell battery.
I’ll keep you all posted as I spend more time … for now I need to get my last expense report of 2007 in!
Nathan's Occasional Blog 
the 3D score is rather low. It’s as high as the Intel SantaRosa integrated chip, while the XT has an ATI discrete graphic chip! So, you should get a higher score with the proper driver for the XT.
Nathan,
I have one very pressing question to ask you and it is of huge importance to me. I am a premedical student and I use onenote to annoatate the pdf files in my lectures. In order to fit everything on the screeen I tend to write really small, but when you write this small I notice the errors that my wacom based gateway tablet makes. How does the pen functionality of the x61t compare to the latitude? If the latitude is super accurate I may just go with it.
Everbave – the drivers used for the scores are straight out of the box. I haven’t checked to see if there are any new releases from Dell (doubt it). If ATI is anything like nVidia then you won’t be able to grab a driver from the manufacturer without a bit of hacking. 🙂
William – small writing seems to work okay, but check my next post for some thoughts on the tablet writing experience.
I’ve been trying for days to get either Ghost 11.02, Ghost 8.0, or Ghost 2003 to work under DOS so i could burn an image to DVD. I have managed to use a IDE to USB adapter and clone it to a used hard drive. If its not too much trouble, do you mind sharing what ghost version and what, if any, DOS drivers you were successful with?
Thanks,
Ron
I have had similar issues trying to Ghost this tablet as the user above. I have tried the same versions of Ghost listed by Ron above. Can you share any information as to how you were able to image this device? Thank you.