Notebook Review: Mobile Computing with the Dell Vostro 3400 Notebook

Dell's latest notebook is slim and swift, offering mobile office workers a lot of power in a compact design. Read our comprehensive review for the details on specs, performance and value.

Something old: "Vostro," Dell says, is Latin for "yours." Something new: one of Intel's latest 32-nanometer-process mobile CPUs, the Core i5-430M, with the chipmaker's Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost technologies. Something borrowed: One of the USB 2.0 ports doubles as an eSATA port for external storage solutions. Something blue: Bluetooth wireless is standard, as is 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi.

This is not to imply that the Dell Vostro 3400 actually qualifies as a bride. But the odds are pretty good that you can have a long and happy relationship with it.

The 3400 is the 14-inch model in a lineup of small-business laptops that spans from the 13.3-inch Vostro 3300 to the 15.6-inch Vostro 3500 and 17.3-inch model 3700. Prices for the 3400 start at $549 with a Core i3 processor, 2GB of RAM, and Intel integrated graphics.

Our test unit was a "FastTrack" or ready-to-ship configuration on Dell's site with the Core i5, 4GB of DDR3 system memory -- which is 1GB more than the preinstalled 32-bit Windows 7 Professional can actually use -- and Nvidia GeForce 310M graphics with their own 512MB of memory. It's listed at $949 with an instant discount to $824.

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Notebook Review: Dell Vostro 3400