Dell is bringing to its enterprise customers a greener notebook that will also help cut down on electrical bills.
The Round Rock, Texas, PC vendor announced three new notebooks May 9 that company officials said can be configured to meet the Environmental Protection Agencys Energy Star 4.0 requirements. These updated configurations, which go into effect July 20, call for 80 percent efficient power supplies and lower idle wattage ratings.
As of now, only Hewlett-Packard offers enterprise desktops that can match the new Energy Star ratings.
In addition to offering two new Intel-based Latitude notebooks, the D630 and D830, Dell will expand its use of Advanced Micro Devices microprocessors with the Latitude D531.
Dell, which now finds itself second to HP in terms of worldwide PC shipments, has been working to reinvent its desktops and notebooks with a heavy emphasis on features that customers have been requesting.
On May 1, Dell broke with tradition and announced a partnership with Canonical to preinstall Ubuntu Linux in its desktops and notebooks. The company has also offered to preinstall Microsofts Windows Vista operating system and Windows XP in accordance with its customers wishes.
On the technology front, Dell has begun selling a solid-state drive option with some of its Latitude notebooks. This offering will now expand to the new notebooks that the company announced May 9.
“Customers are sending us the message that they want mobile products with the latest features but no added complexities that can distract them from building their businesses,” said Margaret Franco, director of Dells Product Group, in a statement.
Unlike several other vendors, Dell is not yet offering a notebook based on the new Intel Centrino Pro platform—the chip makers latest mobile platform that will also premiere May 9. Instead, Dell will offer some of Intels new processors and other features found on the new platform. Dells first notebook based on the new Centrino Pro platform will appear sometime later this year, the company said.
When combined with the Intels new Core 2 Duo processors, Dell officials said the Latitude D630 and D830 will offer 15 percent better performance while giving users more than 9 hours of battery life.
Later this year, Dell will offer an ultramobile notebook, the D430, and a Precision workstation laptop, the M4300, with the same Intel Core 2 Duo processors.
The Latitude D630 and D830 offer Intels new Core 2 Duo processors, which are found on the Centrino Pro platform. These chips offer clock speeds ranging from 1.8GHz to 2.4GHz, an 800MHz FSB (front-side bus) and up to 4MB of L2 cache. The two notebooks also offer Intels 965GM and 965PM chip sets, 4GB of DDR2 (double data rate 2) RAM and a hard disk drive with up to 160GB of memory.
Intels TurboMemory, a NAND-based flash memory, will be an option for both PCs.
Pricing for the D630, which weighs 4.5 pounds and has a 14.1-inch display, starts at $1,189, and the D830, which weighs about 6 pounds and has a 15.4-inch display, starts at $1,249.
The AMD-based D531 comes with either a Sempron 3500+ processor with a clock speed of 1.8GHz or a choice of several dual-core Turion 64 X2 processors with speeds ranging from 1.6GHz to 2.0GHz. The laptop also features an AMD M690T chip set, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, a hard disk drive with up to 120GB of memory and a 14.1-inch display.
The Latitude D531 has a starting price of $839, according to Dell.
All three Latitude notebooks include features such as Cingular Wireless UMTS/HSDPA (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System/High Speed Downlink Data Packet Access) broadband technology, support for draft 802.11n WLAN (wireless LAN) technology and support for security features such as TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 1.2, an integrated feature that allows users to create and store encryption keys.
