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SupportAssist, previously called My Dell, provides system updates, detects issues and sends you alerts based on your device, which makes solving and preventing problems easier than ever. This application gives you access to everything you need to take the guesswork out of maintaining PCs and tablets. For more information and installation instructions see the following link: I've been a computer-tech writer and editor for several decades, and a photographer who writes about photo techniques and equipment for over a decade. My first job in the tech press was as a writer for Compute! magazine, where we used Commodore 64s from Circuit City as word processors. I next became the editor of Computer Dealer, offering advice to computer retailers, then moved on to Personal Computing as an executive editor, where I developed the magazine's benchmark suite. I held several positions at the massive Computer Shopper magazine before becoming editor in chief. While at Computer Shopper (owned by CNET Networks at the time), I edited bi-annual issues of Technology Review as a joint project with Fortune magazine. Before I joined the tech-journalism ranks, I wrote on topics as diverse as Borneo's rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and Big Data's role in presidential elections. A graduate of Middlebury College, I also have a master's degree in journalism and French Studies from New York University. IDC Whitepaper “Optimizing Performance with Frequent Server Replacements for Enterprises” commissioned by Dell Technologies and Intel, March 2021. Results are based on interviews with 18 IT practitioners and decision makers at midsize and large enterprises and a web survey of 707 IT practitioners and decision makers at midsize and larger enterprises using Dell Technologies server solutions across 7 industries. See full whitepaper: https://www.delltechnologies.com/resources/en-us/asset/white-papers/products/servers/server-infrastructure-resiliency-enterprise-whitepaper.pdf There are hardly any tablets in this display size range anymore. For subnotebooks, on the other hand, it is the standard format.
As a direct successor to the 14-inch Latitude 7410 from 2020, the Latitude 7420 in 2022 brings a multitude of changes both inside and out. Only the case design remains the same except for the color scheme and texture. It is an upper mid-range business subnotebook that sits between the smaller Latitude 5000 series and the flagship Latitude 9000 series. The Inspiron 14 does quite well on battery rundown, coming in basically within the margin of error with the Microsoft Surface Pro and the HP Spectre. And face it, anything above the Inspiron’s 12:33 hours is icing on the cake. The two units that exceeded 14 hours on the battery test were the Asus Flip and the Lenovo Yoga. Those looking for the best possible performance are not well advised with this SoC. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon gets 8 to 20% more performance out of the nominally weaker i5-1135G7, as Cinebench R15 and R20 show.I've appeared on CBS News, in USA Today, and at many other outlets to offer analysis on breaking technology news. As far as performance goes, the unit I had was based on an Intel Core i5-1145G7 processor (Tiger Lake), which has four cores and eight threads, with a rated speed of 2.6 GHz and a maximum turbo speed of 4.4 GHz, manufactured on Intel’s 10 nm SuperFin process. You can get it with the higher-end Core i7-1185, which has a base speed of 3.0 GHz and a turbo of 4.8 GHz, which is what the higher-spec laptops I’ve been testing this year have had. Both processors have integrated graphics and support vPro, Intel's enterprise management feature. The unit I used had 16GB of memory and a 512GB solid-state drive, similar to the others. In more intense multimedia content creation tasks like video conversion and image editing, the Latitude 7420 also delivered competitive results. It finished second to the M1-equipped MacBook Pro in Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.
I spend a lot of time testing enterprise laptops, but I nearly always test the top-end of specific models, as that’s what the vendors send for testing. But recently, I’ve been working with a more modestly configured version of the Dell Latitude 7420, and it’s a good reminder of just how much laptops have improved in the past few years. I had reviewed the previous version, the Latitude 7410, and this year's machine offers nice improvements, including the Intel 11th-generation Core (Tiger Lake) processors. Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Graphics Cards and the corresponding Benchmark List. Dell Latitude 14 7420 has a Full HD IPS display, model number Innolux CHF07-140HCG (CMN1416). Its diagonal is 14″ (35.56 cm), and the resolution – 1920 х 1080. Additionally, the screen ratio is 16:9, the pixel density – 157 ppi, their pitch – 0.161 x 0.161 mm. The screen can be considered Retina when viewed from at least 56 cm (from this distance, the average human eye can’t see the individual pixels).
Carbon Fiber, Latitude-Style
We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). The Bluetooth 5.2 version in the Inspiron 14 is the latest. As of version 5.0, Bluetooth supports wireless headphones, game controllers, and smart home devices within 800 feet. Bluetooth 5.2 adds such tweaks as LE Power Control (LEPC), or the ability to allow the transmitter to adjust its transmission power by itself or as requested by a peer device. Standard wireless connectivity comprises an Intel Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) chipset with built-in 2x2 MIMO support and Bluetooth 5.1. The Latitude 7420 supports eSIM, so if you opt for the optional mobile broadband and your carrier supports eSIM as well, you won't need to use the physical slot. First responders and public safety organizations eyeing the Latitude 7420 may appreciate that the LTE version supports the dedicated, high-capacity FirstNet LTE bands. The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light. The Latitude 7420's direct competitors include other high-end business subnotebooks such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon G9, ThinkPad T14s, the HP EliteBook 840 Aero, and - as dGPU models - the affordable MSI Modern 14 and the ThinkPad T14 Gen2.
Dell Optimizer also includes a number of audio options, such as letting you select the room environment for doing conferencing in a quiet room, noisy office, one with multiple voices speaking, or in a recording studio; allowing 3D audio through your headphones (which I personally don't care for); and an auto-mute feature that removed sounds that occur when you are not speaking. It doesn't have the fancy audio of the 9420, but for most applications, the microphone and dual speakers worked just fine. Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day. Compared with the higher-end Latitude 9420 I tested recently, there are trade-offs for this slightly lower end model, but they are small. Our “Design and Gaming” profile delivers optimal color temperature (6500K) at 140 cd/m2 luminance and sRGB gamma mode.
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For information about systems that have been upgraded to Windows 10 please see the following article: Work wherever: Our 2-in-1s feature Corning® Gorilla® Glass, which offers premium glass innovation for better readability and durability, so you can work anywhere your job takes you. *
Idle runtime at minimum brightness (still readable, 22 cd/m²) is over 23 hours. Here, the competition lasts just as long or longer. This runtime has little significance for practical use, which is why it is not available for all models. In my benchmarks, the 1145 tended to run 10 to 20 percent slower than the 1185-based systems, which wasn’t a surprise. On tougher tests, transcoding a 4K video to FHD took 3 hours and 15 minutes on the 7420 compared with two hours and 32 minutes on the 9420. A big Excel data table took 46 minutes to run, compared with about 41 on the other systems; and a MatLab portfolio simulation took 52 minutes, compared with 47-49 minutes on the others. One important thing to note: even this slower Tiger Lake chip performed notably better than the high-end 14nm Comet Lake chips that were in this class of machine a year ago. When I tested last year’s Latitude 7410 with a four core/eight thread Core i7-10610, the Excel data table took 63 minutes and the MatLab simulation took 73 minutes; so the difference is significant. Typical users should be quite pleased with the performance. Intel’s 12th Generation processors certainly acquitted themselves well, especially in multi-threaded tests, such as Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 5.4.1 Pro, where the Inspiron and the Yoga topped all others. The extra cores helped there. Productivity Tests
Emissions - Laptop with fine tuning
The advantage of subnotebooks is that the entire laptop can be small and therefore easily portable. The smaller display also has the advantage of requiring less power, which further improves battery life and thus mobility. The disadvantage is that reading texts is more strenuous on the eyes. High resolutions are more likely to be found in standard laptops.» To find out how fine a display is, see our DPI List. The unit I tried had a 2.1-megapixel 1080p webcam with a proximity sensor. I was a bit disappointed in the camera—even though it’s higher resolution than the 720p cameras I see on a lot of machines, the video was a bit softer in focus and had more of a tendency to whiteout than I’d like. It's adequate, but the cameras in the machines I've most recently tested from both Lenovo and HP are better than what I've seen from Dell. Our specific test model is a mid-range SKU with Core i5-1145G7 CPU and 512 GB SSD for around 1,400 Euros. Overall, even to the naked eye, colors seem somewhat faded, and both brightness and saturation could use a boost. Working in a bright environment would be challenging. Subjectively, the Inspiron 14 2-in-1 appears best with the display set at 85% to 100% brightness, in a modestly lit kitchen nook. In the same room, the Inspiron 16 2-in-1 only needs the level set to 50% to 60% to achieve the same effect. In fact, adjusting a photo on each unit to the same size (compensating for the 16-inch display’s size advantage), a scene of trees on a sunny day appeared brighter and with richer colors on the 16-inch unit, probably because the Inspiron 16 is capable of displaying 96% of the sRGB gamut to the Inspiron 14’s 64%. I'm also including the ThinkPad X1 Yoga, a 2-in-1 that competes with the convertible version of the Latitude 7420. Finally, since our Latitude is a clamshell laptop without a touch screen, a comparison with the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro is also useful.Many corporate users covet Mac laptops, too.
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