We purchased Dell Latitude 13 laptops for our Year 9 1:1 program. These are very pleasant devices to use, a good 13” LCD & full size keys. They are thin & light, with a brushed metal shell, internal battery & no optical drive. We bought these as they presented well to parents, & were much lighter than the rather clunky E5400 model.
The conventional wisdom has always been never to buy Version 1.0 – we ignored this (the L13 was a brand new model) to our detriment. This model has a fault which is either a SATA cable, or the plug-in board that carries the SATA connector & the Audio ports. The fault manifests itself at startup, with a ‘No boot device available’ error. The HDD does not appear in the BIOS.
The drive itself is fine – when the part is replaced, all data is intact & available, until the part fails again. Of 100 machines purchased, we have had 16 failures of this kind in the first 7 weeks. Some of these have been replaced parts that have failed again. Dell have taken the issue back to the factory to find the source of the problem. In the meantime, the replacement part has become unavailable, so a number of laptops sit unrepaired.
The other issue has been fragility. It is a given that a smaller, lightweight laptop will be more fragile than a heavier, chunkier unit. Our mistake was not factoring in the testosterone-fuelled pile of stupid that is your average Year 9 boy. You can’t drop it off a desk without expecting the LCD to break. You can’t lean on the closed lid, you can’t stand on it, & you certainly can’t attach it to the Design & Technology workbench with a bloody great G-clamp without expecting it to break. <SIGH>
Dell are hoping for a fix to the hardware problem very soon, & will retrofit our fleet with whatever fix they come up with. In the meantime, I am left wondering if we should have bought the big ugly clunky E5400s, rather than the slim, pretty, but horribly flawed L13s.