I unboxed and deployed about 500 of these a few months ago. They are pretty unremarkable laptops but decent for the price. Durable and reasonably easy to work on. The RAM is not soldered down and you could easily upgrade to SSD later on. The touchpad and screen are both enjoyable. I didn't like the keyboard though, it felt like the key travel was very short and mushy. I am not a keyboard snob at all (no mechanical keyboards in my house) and I still found it hard to type on. We did have maybe 10/500 that came from the factory with sticky keys (that stick down or are very slow to come back up) so this seems to be something they are prone to. Another issue is the cable that connects the touchscreen to the motherboard seems to break under normal use. If you are not buying a touchscreen model though this probably won't matter to you, and in any case they might have come up with a better cable by now since I believe they are aware of this problem. It only affects the touchscreen input, not the display itself. I have played AOE and AOEII on mine and it ran well. Normally i5 indicates four cores, but the i5 in this laptop is really more of an i3. It is a dual core with hyperthreading. You can now buy laptops with the next-gen i3-5020u which is the same configuration (dual core with hyperthreading) and much cheaper. Then you could spend the difference on an SSD. For instance, you could buy something like this and something like this . This would be a better setup IMO. More on reddit.com

All of them except for the 3440 and 840 G10 come with soldered RAM. Although I probably wouldn't get the 3440 as Latitude 3000 series laptops are rebrands of Inspirons/Vostros with not so good build quality compared to 5000 and 7000 series models. Other than the 840 G10, you could also take a look at the G9 which is one generation older, as well as the Latitude 5440 and 5430. More on reddit.com

Its a good system for everything except the gaming... More on reddit.com

It should be okay. Here's a review of the laptop with an i5-4200u CPU. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-3340-Notebook.116268.0.html The 4th gen i3-4005u maxes out at 1.7GHz, but that should be decent enough for everyday use. It has a 1366x768 resolution screen, but I suppose it is okay for a 13.3" screen. I just personally prefer a 1080p screen. I have it's bigger brother the 15.6" Dell Latitude 3540 with a 4th gen i5-4200u and 1080p screen. I bought it refurbished back in 2014 and I still use occasionally mostly for surfing, but I use it to play some older games at 1080p resolution. It came with 4GB of RAM so I added a 2nd 4GB RAM stick for a total of 8GB of RAM. With two sticks of RAM of the same capacity, it allows the RAM to run at full speed or dual channel mode rather than half speed or single channel mode with only a single stick of RAM. That improves the performance of integrated graphics (the Intel HD 4400) by roughly 10% to 15%, but actual performance gains depends on the specific game. Currently using it to play Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, but I also used it to play Skyrim (not the Special Edition version) and the Mass Effect Trilogy and some older games. More on reddit.com