Digital Archaeology: Dell Latitude E5500

The Latitude line has traditionally been Dell's business line of laptops with the Inspiron line targeted towards the home market. The Latitude E5500, or at least this one, features a Core 2 Duo T7250 CPU @ 2 GHz and Intel Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics. Highlights include:

• CPU: Core 2 Duo T7250 @ 2 GHz
• Memory: 4 GB DDR2 @ 800 MHz
• Graphics: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 4500MHD

More a more complete hardware inventory, check out the output of HardInfo.

Like most laptop models, this one was available in a wide variety of configurations though they all would have had a Core 2 Duo variant of some kind. At the time it was released, this would have been a midrange configuration and it probably shipped with 2 GB of RAM and was upgraded later to 4 GB. This brings up perhaps the biggest limitation of this laptop. While it has a 64-bit CPU, it is still restricted to a maximum of 4 GB of RAM.

The fact that this laptop uses an integrated Intel graphics solution rules it out for gaming, at least for games that were coming out at the time this laptop was relevant.

However, in my opinion at least, the Latitudes of this era hold up better than the Inspirons in terms of styling. This model is pretty simple with its plain matte black look in heavy duty plastic.

There seems to have been a couple of different keyboard designs. One includes a trackpoint and the extra mouse buttons to go with it while the other only includes a trackpad. Mine only has the trackpad. One nice thing about this laptop is the variety of ports it has. It still has an optical drive as well.

As far as contemporary use, I think Windows 10 has become too much of a memory hog over the years with subsequent updates to really be reasonable to use with only 4 GB. It works somewhat better with Linux though as long as you don't go too crazy with opening tons of browser tabs. The 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor is really still plenty fast enough for any typical office tasks and basic web browsing.

Whenever I have this laptop turned on, it is of course running BOINC and participating in various projects. Having a 64-bit processor and running Linux, it can do work for all of the projects I participate in including Einstein@home, Milkyway@home, World Community Grid, Rosetta@home, Universe@home and Asteroids@home. You can see how it is doing overall at FreeDC.

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