I had this D420 for over 2 years and I can safely say it is one laptop with enough horsepower for the average business professional. It came with windows xp preinstalled, and I recently upgraded it to win 7. The upgrade went surprisingly smooth, with all devices (lapyop contained) being identified. The laptop itself is very lightweight and can be carried in a very small laptop bag (which will not feel like your carrying a bowling bowl) It is powered by a centrino processor and it can handle max capacity of 2 GB ram. Since the laptop is light weight, they decided to make the cd/dvd drive external. It plugs into the usb plug located in the rear of the unit. It seems to be slow to spin up, and is a bit of a hassle (if you forget to take it with you) Battery life is very good. I still get close to 3 hours on a system I had for 2 years. The big down side is heat. After 45 minutes the bottom of the laptop can get very hot! I suggest you leave some room to cool or get a laptop platform with cooling fans. Other than that a nice laptop for professional use.

kbenson

Pleasanton, CA

I bought this computer refurbished from Dell for an excellent price about three years ago.  I like it, but it's not perfect.  It is very slim and small, which is important to me since I take it to and from work every single day and need to have it with me a lot of the time.  It's not the fastest computer out there by any means, but it's not slow either. My biggest complaint is the size of the hard drive.  My iPod has a bigger hard drive than this computer... literally.  I store most of what I need on an external drive, so it's not a huge deal, but next time I buy a computer, it will have a bigger hard drive than this one.  Also, although the computer comes with a CD/DVD drive, but it is external and bulky, so you probably won't have it with you when you need it.  That said, I'm surprised at how little I actually need a CD/DVD drive these days so just keeping it on my desk at home has worked pretty well so far. These days, you can probably get a faster computer with a built-in CD/DVD drive and a larger hard drive for cheaper elsewhere, so I probably wouldn't recommend this computer anymore, but I am pretty happy with it.

NMiller

Palo Alto, CA