Best Dell laptop for programming 2017

When looking for the best laptop for programming, you'll have a certain set of criteria that the device will need to meet, as well as features it will need to have. For example, you're going to need plenty of processing power in a laptop for programming, so that it can compile and run your code as fast as possible. Thankfully, modern laptop processors come with plenty of cores and high clock speeds, which certainly makes looking for the best laptop for programming easier.

You'll also want plenty of RAM. We'd recommend at least 8GB - if you're running complex code, and you'll need a large hard drive. If a laptop also comes with a solid state drive (SSD), that's even better, as it will help with the overall speed of your programming and coding - especially if you regularly rebuild the code you write with minor changes.

Having a dedicated graphics card isn't essential for a laptop for programming, unless you are coding graphically-intensive games that you then want to test out. Modern Intel processors come with integrated graphics capabilities that are powerful enough for pretty much all programming tasks.

Dell Latitude E5480

Dell managed to deliver a magnificent piece of kit which it says is the most secure, most reliable and most manageable business-class laptop. That Latitude 5480 does come at a hefty price though and compared to the competition, this notebook may feel underwhelming. However, Dell's forte lies in its services and aftersales. That particular model comes with a 7th generation Intel CPU, one that is an actual four-core CPU. While it has a far higher TDP than most of its peers (45W vs 15W), it is likely to be more powerful than even a top of the range Core i7-7600U.