The ruggedised Dell Latitude E6420 XFR is a fortress in a grapple design. It fits the criteria of a suite of drop and military tests, and its parts include a fast combination of an SSD and Core i7 processor that will serve you not only boot your system quickly, but make quick work of any productivity tasks. Its battery will last five hours, and with the extra 30Wh battery handy, you will easily be able to make it through the whole day without worry.
Like most rugged laptops, the Latitude E6420 XFR is quite thick, measuring 2.2 inches. It sports a design that resembles a briefcase, with a handle protruding just underneath the palm rest. Its hefty weight of 9.38 pounds comes as no surprise, given its black PR-72 ultra polymer exterior and magnesium alloy interior. The laptop's 14-inch screen has a 1,366-by-768 resolution and has a feature unique to its category: an anti-glare screen that can be used easily in direct sunlight.
On 1st glance, the Latitude E6420 XFR looks like a port-less laptop, but that's just because there is plastic covers total of the ports to prevent dust and small particles from coming in your laptop and destroying it from the inside out. The Latitude E6420 XFR also comes equipped with Clear Wi MAX, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth
The 128GB SSD will help protect your data from the usual vibrations and cracks that a spinning 5,400rpm or 7,200rpm hard drive usually suffers. It also has some special programs installed on it to protect your data from potential theft like Dell Data Protection, which provides encrypted hard drive options, and Dell Backup and Recovery.
The E6420 XFR was built to perform, with a 2.7-GHz Intel Core i7-2620M processor and 6GB of DDR3 RAM. In our day-to-day performance test, PCMark 7, the Latitude E6420 scored 4 ,035 points-94 points better than the Asus G74SX-A2, a gaming laptop equipped with a slightly superior Core i7-2630QM processor. In media creation tasks, the Latitude E6420 flourished, encoding a video in Handbrake in 1 minute 38 seconds, and running through our Photoshop CS5 test in 3:32. It should be noted that while running these tests, there was quite a bit of heat emanating from the laptop: 109 degrees measured by our Fluke thermometer.
The Dell Latitude E6420 XFR is made for the off-roading field worker. Just make sure a healthy enterprise is backing the payment, as $5,612 isn't exactly a consumer-friendly price-point.-NS