I was excited to get this 9510 -- bought it through my university, with all the bells and whistles. And maybe if we weren't all locked down I'd be enjoying that huge battery life, light weight, etc. But just using the 9510 as a working laptop at home, it's endlessly troublesome to use, mostly because the touchpad is badly placed.
Relative to my older Latitude, the 9510 keyboard is moved a full inch to the right and centered, in order to accommodate the two side speakers. Doesn't sound like much, but the touchpad is then expanded to center under the keypad rather than slightly to the left - see photos (old Latitude on left, 9510 on right) - and it's much bigger than the old touchpad. Unless you're left handed, which might make this a great improvement, this means you have to move your right hand into a different attitude entirely and stretch your fingers much further apart to move the cursor and reach the click areas of the touchpad. As a result, after seven months of heavy use, I still haven't gotten used to it. I keep hitting the click areas higher than I need to, sometimes generating nothing, sometimes generating unexpected actions due to accidental key combos, and have to repeat or correct it. This happens a LOT. I do find the keypad itself both comfortable and fast for touch typing, but after I've been touch typing for a while the moment I click the touchpad half the time I end up swearing under my breath, as I move my hand into a significantly different position. No affection building for this machine. It feels gaddywumpus all the time.
Another problem is that the 9510, at least on my university's configuration (same as the old one), is very slow starting up. Often, upon reviving the machine from hibernation, I find all the icons on my bottom taskbar aren't there, or only a couple appear with just a ghostly outline, for a good ten minutes, like just the lousy Office taskbars are gobbling up too much memory. I've memorized the location of the app buttons relative to F-keys so I can start Chrome by clicking on the right location in a blank black bar, etc., but this is ridiculous. It's also not noticably faster than my old machine, so it's not making up for this cranky start in other ways.
As a result, I'm a lot less happy with this 9510 than I wanted to be. Maybe it's brilliant for things I'm not using it for, but given the price, I'd recommend getting something else if you want a good business laptop.
UPDATE: Another problem with this machine: the N-key has developed a hole in the top plastic layer, which doesn't affect how it works but sure looks crummy. See photo. I've never had this happen on a laptop and I have no idea why it happened here - I'm very careful with it. But wait, there's more! Turns out you can't order a replacement key for the 9510, you have to buy a whole new keyboard. Come on, Dell - a laptop used by a sedentary grey-haired lady has keys so vulnerable as to lose their "paint" wears off after just 9 months of use and she must spend so much to fix it?
| Standing screen display size | 15 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1200 pixels |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1200 |
| Processor | 1.7 GHz core_i5 |
| RAM | 16 GB DDR4 |
| Hard Drive | 256 GB |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Intel HD Graphics 520 |
| Chipset Brand | Intel |
| Card Description | Integrated |
