Dell Latitude Z Owner's Lounge

For our purposes Z performance has been indistingishable from the 2+ GHz Latitude D and E series notebooks they replaced. We are mostly running MS Office apps with large files such as Outlook against Exchange with typical local folders of a size around 4 GB, Excel, MS Access, that kind of thing. We work on the web a lot. We store thousands of project files on our machines and have to search for them often. Occaisionally when we can't do it in a client's environment we might use Visual Studio to write or debug an app. None of these things seem slow on the Z at all.

As a side note, I'm a lot happier with the machine after having switched to the smaller battery. It gives me all the battery life I need (a couple of hours) and the machine is MUCH more comfortable to carry and hold...

 

rmp,

Cool, thanks for all the info, am looking forward to getting mine tomorrow.

 

Quick question, I am in the process of setting everything up and I can't seem to find the Capture software anywhere on the machine. I also have looked online for a quick download but haven't had much luck. Am I missing something here, shouldn't this of come preloaded? If not, how would I go about obtaining it?

 

I downloaded the program from the dell support site. I ordered a Z from the outlet a couple of months ago, but had issues with it so I returned it. I really liked that program so I downloaded it and plan on installing it on my Adamo. Don't know if it will work or not.

I ordered another Z today from the outlet with a 25 % off coupon so I got a good deal. I really liked this laptop. If this unit is good, the adamo is going to visit e-bay!

 

Hi NobleWolf,

I appoligize for bring up a post that is a few months old, but I thought I should still post so that I can clear something up...

for TRIM to actually be working you need to set your BIOS SATA setting to 'AHCI'. The 'fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify' would still show a 0... but the TRIM feature, although enabled, still will not clean up the SSD without SATA being set to AHCI. And on top of that, the SSDs firmware must be compatible with the TRIM feature.

Unfortunately, after setting to AHCI you will have to reinstall the Win7 onto the SSD again... otherwise it will hang at the swirling logo when it tries to boot. I ran into this problem not long ago. I had a new laptop, I spent a weekend reinstalling the OS for a clean install. But I didn't realize until a few weeks later that I had to have the BIOS set to AHCI for TRIM to work. After doing some research on this subject I finally decided to simply reinstall the OS again (after first setting the BIOS to AHCI of course).

The good news is that the SSD(s) you have in your Z is probably a late model Samsung drive. Most of the Samsungs of late incorporate their own garbage collection into their firmware. They will perform garbage collection regardless of the OS or if Window's TRIM feature is enabled & working or not. They do not do this in real time though like the Windows7 TRIM does. Instead the garbage collection runs during idle periods. Leaving your computer on at the system login prompt over night for example would allow the GC to kick in.

Nice laptop by the way. I'm browsing this thread because I really like them. I don't have a Z myself but I sure wouldn't mind owning one.

Ben

 

Reinstallation of Windows can be avoided. The advice in this thread should work if you have the Intel PM45 / GM45 chipset and, if you have the new chipset then there's a link at/near the end to the corresponding fix.

John

 

which thread? Were you intending to include a link? Anyone know which chipset the dell latitude Z has?

* i should first clarify that i do not have a Dell Latitude Z. Just trying to help. And I hope I'm not confusing matters.

As far as I know you cannot have TRIM working on your SSD drives unless, first of all, your drives firmware supports it... and 2nd you have the MS AHCI drivers. You cannot get those drivers installed without reinstalling windows after turning SATA AHCI on in the BIOS settings. I tried manually installing the MS drivers on my machine but windows said they were not supported, which of course is not really true. But none the less I could not install them manually, i ended up reinstalling the OS.

But some people have been lucky and are able to do a few registry changes to allow them to set AHCI on and still boot without a reinstall (i suspect this is what your link was pointing to?)...and that does work sometimes. But I've also heard from some of those same people that they'd later get blue screens on bootup.

The registry changes didn't work at all for me. I tried that first but it still hung up on the swirling windows logo. I ended up deciding to bite the bullet and reinstall. But I don't have a latitude Z either.

I would probably rely on the GC versus setting AHCI and reinstalling at this point anyway. Plus the MS AHCI drivers slow performance a tad, or so I've read.

 

Oops. Sorry At least someone reads my posts.

I meant this thread. I believe that the Z uses the Intel GM45 chipset (it has the X4500 graphics).

John

 

Could you point me to the download link on the Dell site? I can't find it - from what I read online I had come the consensus that it was something you need to order with the system when you buy it.

 

Hi, I'm thinking of purchasing a Z from the outlet, can you guys help me find these coupons that you all seem to find ? Haha,

Thank you so much in advance