Digital Archaeology: Dell Latitude XT

The Dell Latitude XT is a tablet PC that was released at the end of 2007. When closed or first opened, it looks like a fairly typical laptop albeit a relatively small one. However, the screen can rotate and fold back so that it functions as more of a tablet when you want it to.

Its specs include:

• CPU: Core 2 Duo U7600 @ 1.2 GHz
• RAM: 2 GB DDR 533 MHz
• Hard Drive: Samsung HS122JC (120 GB)
• Video: Radeon Xpress 1250
• Screen: 12.1" WXGA (1280 x 800) capacitive touch screen

For more complete specs, check out the output from HardInfo.

The "U" series of Core 2 Duo processors were low voltage. The advantage of course is increased battery life but that increased battery life comes at the cost of speed. The 1.2 GHz processor in this machine was the fastest available for this machine though there was a slower 1.06 GHz model available too.

The Radeon Xpress 1250 is an integrated graphics solution. It is based on a dedicated X300 GPU but shares memory with the rest of the system. It wouldn't have been very good for modern games at the time but would have been ok with older games. It also supported Aero which was part of Vista's interface. This was an important capability measure at the time for graphics hardware.

The hard drive is the harder to find 1.8" variety but at least it operates at 5400 RPM. A couple of the other hard drives that were available for this laptop when it shipped new were only 4200 RPM. The 120 GB model was also the biggest available at the time. You could also chose a 32GB or 64GB solid state drive.

The screen is a reasonable resolution, especially given the small size. This laptop would have shipped with Windows Vista or with Windows XP Tablet Edition. However, I've installed Xubuntu. For the most part it works fine but it does not seem to have drivers for the touchscreen capabilities. This doesn't really bother me as I won't really be using it as a tablet and don't really need the touchscreen capabilities. I haven't really looked into if there is a way to get the touchscreen working in Linux.

As far as tablet PCs go, this seems like this would have been a pretty decent choice. However, tablet PCs always seemed like too much of a compromise to me. They tended to be relatively expensive compared to a traditional laptop. On the other hand, you lose out on some of the advantages of a laptop. You are sacrificing speed so that you can get reasonable life out of a smaller battery and for the same reason you aren't getting very powerful graphics capabilities. For the same price, you could get a much more powerful laptop. True tablets, designed from the ground up to be so, were still a few years away with both the iPad and Android tablets being introduced in the 2010-2011 time frame. These were much cheaper as well as smaller and lighter than something like the XT.

I use this machine like a laptop when I am using it as opposed to a tablet. Like any other machine I use it also runs BOINC. So far it has processed (or is processing) tasks for Einstein@home, Milkyway@home, Universe@home, Asteroids@home, and World Community Grid. Since The Core 2 Duo is a 64-bit CPU and I am running a modern version of Linux, it can work with most of my usual projects. You can also check out how it is doing overall at FreeDC.