Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Glad you guys like 'em. I'm always a little nervous recommending refurbished and unusual hardware to people, but I'm still absolutely loving mine. Got a 12pm flight tomorrow (nonstop SAN -> JFK) and I look forward to catching up on Top Gear the whole way.

Sony apparently still thinks we can all go **** ourselves insofar as ignoring the 11-12" market (and I hope they all die in a fire), and the smallest of the Dells has yet again crept up in size to 12.5".

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

Just thought I'd mention that my E4200 runs exceptionally well on Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon 64-bit, much crisper than it did on Vista-32. Installation was a breeze, too. The only thing it didn't pick up right away was the wireless driver. Hooked it up to an ethernet connection, ran the Update Manager, and it immediately found, downloaded, and installed the right driver.

There's still a few things here and there that are irritating about Linux (most notably, the lack of a good Silverlight replacement), but for general use it's pretty great.

18psi

iTrader: (76)

curly

iTrader: (25)

FYI, my E4200 is starting to show a little age. I've upgraded the keyboard for a backlit one for $24, and a new battery for $40. It's performing better than ever, but after my wife bought a Lenovo convertible laptop, I'm super envious of screen resolution and speed.

I am NOT super envious of her windows 8 though.

slmhofy

iTrader: (5)

Mine originally came with a 4 cell battery and I wasn't impressed with it for the longest time. Eventually that battery died and I got a 6 cell replacement from eBay and it helped with battery life tremendously.

But damn! I've always wished this had a back light. Working with this thing at night in the car is a pain.

Where'd you get your battery and especially your keyboard?

EDIT: Looks like it's just a simple matter of purchasing backlit keyboard and installing.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell...st4408904.html

I'm pretty sure I looked at this before, but must have lost interest or forgot. Time to search eBay for a keyboard.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Correct. I bought one from a random eBay vendor a few years ago. Easy to install, and I absolutely love it.

My E4200 is still rocking, and I have no plans to replace it.

curly

iTrader: (25)

Yeah, mine was $25 shipped. Had to do some searching, as I found a number of foreign keyboards that obviously wouldn't work.

Install was easy, pry up the panel above the keyboard, two screws, and one ribbon cable and the keyboard is out. Install includes two ribbon cables, a second small one for the back light.

Be careful with the ribbon cable, the little clip folds up a little backwards from how you may think it works from looking at it.

slmhofy

iTrader: (5)

Thanks guys. I found what appears to be an OEM Dell piece from a USA seller. This is just more icing on the cake. The first being the 6 cell battery. This thing will definitely hold me over until I find something that I really want.

What I'm really waiting and wanting for is something like a Surface Pro 3 with a good backlit keyboard that attaches very solidly and hinges. Kind of like a Asus T100. Great tablet that I can mount in the car and use with TS, and then have a nice keyboard/trackpad/battery/ports/etc that I can use most of the rest of the time.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

Decided it was finally time to move on from my E4200. It's still working okay, but little things -- choppy video playback, sticky scrolling on complex web pages, etc. -- were starting to bug me.

I picked up a refurbed Dell E6220 with an i5 and Win7 Pro for about $100 on eBay. I cloned the drive to an extra SSD I already had, and upgraded it to 16GB of ram. I figure it should get me through the next 4 or 5 years pretty easily. If you spend a little more, say $150-175, you can pick up E6220's with i7's as well.