During the review, we'll take a look at how the 5480 compares to the other business-savvy machines like the Lenovo ThinkPad T460s, the new Lenovo ThinkPad T470, the HP ProBook 440 G4, or thethe Acer TravelMate P648. Trusted authentication: The Latitude 5480 offers multiple security options to meet your diverse security needs. The Latitude 5480 emits an average 202 nits (a measurement of brightness), making it dimmer than the 245-nit average, ThinkPad T460 (239-nits touch screen, 242-nits non-touch) and the ProBook 440 G3 (243 nits). Our indoor test picture was was taken in a room with a ceiling fan equipped with 3x 13W (60W equivalent) Soft White light bulbs above and to the left of the notebook.

You'll be pleased with the unit's road-ready reliability (it's passed a slew of military standard tests for things like shock, vibration, and extreme temperatures). An interesting note on the C840 is that it was the last Dell notebook (along with its sister models the Inspiron 8200 and Precision M50) to have both a "fixed" optical drive as well as a modular bay, making it a "three-spindle" notebook. We recommend it for fleet deployment in your enterprise, plus distribution to specialized workers who'll appreciate its available near-workstation levels of performance.

Dell has partnered with N-trig, providers of DuoSense technology, combining pen, capacitive touch and multi-touch in a single device. It aims to combine heavy-duty power with reasonable portability, and differs primarily from D8x0 series in screen size. Our test unit carried an impressive warranty with three years of on-site service after remote diagnostics, compared to the one year of many rivals.

The battery life of the Latitude 5480 is second to none - 16 hours of WLAN surfing should be sufficient even for the most diligent worker bees. The Iomega Zip 250 module was released as the successor to the similar module for the Latitude C-series. The Education series laptops are designed for use in educational institutions and are geared towards office and internet based applications. The pointstick - still our preferred input method when it comes to simply moving the cursor around - works great as well. Extremely high loads (stress test) causes the temperature to rise to 45 degrees on the bottom left side and can make lap use slightly uncomfortable.The optional Nvidia graphics on this series of laptops are prone to overheating issues where the GPU would develop cracks in the solder.

While it offers better contrast, both the color space coverage and brightness in particular - the new panel is 35 % dimmer - have taken a major hit. The quad-core Latitude 5480 predictably pulverized its dual-core competition in the CPU-intensive Cinebench scene rendering (score 737) and Handbrake video transcoding (time 1:01) tests. They also have overheating issues: the D620/D630 and D820/D830 were available with an Intel integrated GMA or Nvidia graphics chip.Dell offers industry-leading encryption, authentication including optional touch fingerprint reader and leading-edge malware prevention from a single source right out of the box. The screen's fine 1080p resolution allowed me to see each crooked, scraggly whisker of Wolverine's beard. The computer could be configured with Windows XP Home or Professional, or Windows 2000 Professional.