I've got a 7140 with the battery keyboard, to be honest, can't think of any flaws, battery life is awesome, tablet on it's own, add the keyboard and you can fly to New York and back and still have power left. Perhaps the only downside is the screen is a little small for the resolution, so you may end up scaling.

I got my tablet of the Dell outlet for around £400 (256GB SSD + 8GB RAM) and the keyboard for £70 off Ebay.

mike

Got the 7140 and love it :smiley:
Take my advice if you want the mobile keyboard with battery in ........ go for the Nordic one , its qwerty and the other odd keys just buy some stickers from ebay ..................got my new Nordic one £20 on ebay and now have 16 hours plus battery life

I've had the 4300y 8gb/256gb version (7139 vpro i believe) and my advice is to stay away from this tablet.

The 7130 series has serious throttling and power management issues, while on paper it has/had amazing specs the power limiter will not allow you to use it, so it's no where near as snappy or power you'd expect the i5 to be.

I was able to fix this following a guide online which allows you to override the power limiter which is set to something stupid like 6w default with no way to up it by default, when it turbos it needs around 12w to utilise the power of the processor. It also hard throttled the cpu at a stupidly low temperature, which you'd reach just browsing or watching a youtube video.

The trouble with the fix is that you don't just do it then forget about it and have a decent tablet, every time you charge the tablet or dock it with the keyboard etc you have to turn the tablet off in sleep mode, wait a few seconds then turn it on and reapply all the changes, which as you can imagine becomes annoying after a very short period of time.

I think the 7140 series fixed this, they upgraded the design and included loads of copper heat sinks on the back cover for heat dissipation, and upped the power limiter. But i've lost faith in Dell and their tablets, aside from the ridiculous design flaw that made it as slow as the atom version, i had so many issues with the wifi card installed in it also.

Looks like this is the only cheap UK Hard keyboard on Ebay right now. These are rarer then hens teeth!

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/131875108272?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

I've got a Venue 11 Pro (7130) i3-4020Y from here which I'm pretty happy with. It's nicely built, nice screen and smooth running. With the keyboard/battery addon it makes a nice little touchscreen laptop.

My advice is go for the i3 version I have, Y series processors are power limited, so they can burst at their full clock rate, but for sustained use they throttle down to a set wattage, at which point I see little benefit in having the i5.

Mine runs windows very smoothly, plays any video I've tried on it and is even happy with some of my modest steam games like Civ V and The Walking Dead.

Hot, thanks for sharing OP :smile:

we bought over 300 of these for work. I've never seen such a failure rate in hardware in 20 years. it's been so painful we've considered just ditching them ahead of the warranty expiring. driver problems, BIOS problems, build problems, pen problems, touch screen problems, the docks are terrible, there keyboards are either too floppy and get complaints or the hard keyboard with a battery makes them heavier than our 12" laptops. they were a disaster.

Nice one Jay :wink: Ordered

Really nice hardware and not a bad deal, but I ended up getting a Broadwell Core-M version from eBay for £200. Sometimes it's worth hanging back and waiting for the best deal.

They have an option for this. What is it? and is it required for something?

I've had one of these for a while - if you get the keyboard with the 2nd battery in it they have a major flaw... basically stops working but touch screen on the tablet is still able to be used. The only way around it is to open the keyboard and disconnect the battery in it.

The cpu speed does drop down pretty drastically but this can be fixed (google it), also the 3g card can be bought very cheap for mobile broadband. Only thing I would say, if you can afford it, get a model with 8gb ram.

Nice find.

I have the i3 4Gb 7130 model with external keyboard and don't suffer the flaws comrade dave74 mentioned above
(running Win10Pro, and installed all the drivers from the Dell website)

The only issue I have is with the keyboard = when the tablet is in Sleep mode and the keyboard is connected the battery of both the keyboard and tablet battery drain.
As described here:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/mobile-devices/f/4586/t/19538996

This or a 2nd hand surface pro 2?

just be careful about this model.
It is pretty easy to get overheating, it will lower down the CPU to 0.5Ghz which is dead slow.

Pretty sure I picked up my 7139 i5 from MCS for about £175 about 10 months ago.

I've got a 7140 with the battery keyboard, to be honest, can't think of any flaws, battery life is awesome, tablet on it's own, add the keyboard and you can fly to New York and back and still have power left. Perhaps the only downside is the screen is a little small for the resolution, so you may end up scaling.

I got my tablet of the Dell outlet for around £400 (256GB SSD + 8GB RAM) and the keyboard for £70 off Ebay.

mike

From my understanding the i5 uses a lot more battery than the i3. I've owned an i3 twice and loved them both times (just stopped using them as I would use my laptop).

The first one from mcs didn't charge on the usb port, so they sent out a charger that used the bottom port and clearly the cmos battery needed replacing but they couldn't care less.

I'm with an ipad mini at the moment but with the niggling feeling that one of these with 8gb ram and 256gb disk will suit me better...Yes I know I have a problem but after getting rid of my Toughbook CF-U1's at a £100 profit, I feel this may apeeze me for a few weeks.

I ended up with the flexible cover keyboard which didn't really work for me, was neither a cover/keyboard or stand.. loved the actual tablet though.

Really tempting.

Make sure you read this first: http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/threads/trying-to-decide-surface-3-vs-dell-venue-11-pro-7130-or-7140.66167/

Overall I think it is a very good deal.

totally worth it if you can get a keyboard cheap

You should be able to re-map the keys. I bought a US version for my 8" Dell but never bothered swapping them round in the end

very interesting! think i prefer the atom one for battery life? my asus t100 lasts forever! well 8 hours plus!