Dell Latitude Z series

1) As long as the backup is done while the OS is running, then yes. No booting from USB drives, etc., to do the backups.
2) Not that I ever saw. It performed as fast as a normal Samsung 256GB SSD.
3) Yes. It comes unencrypted, as a matter of fact. You have to jump thru hoops to enable the security and encryption.

Let me tell you, though, that the one SSD that I did enable encryption wound up biting me in the you-know-what. I had done some software/firmware updates (via the Dell.com website), and before you knew it, I could no longer authenticate the boot password needed to boot an encrypted drive. Basically, everything was lost. There is NO WAY of getting data off an encrypted drive. Dell even argued about replacing it (which was their fault since their updates rendered it useless). Ultimately, they did replace it and I installed it and never enabled the encryption again.

You are warned. Keep a good backup at all times.

 

Thanks for the detailed response. I'll stay away from the encryption.
However, I'm disapointed to hear that I won't be able to boot off the CD-ROM to run my true-image backups.

 

I love my new Z600. My biggest worry was about performance, but this thing is plenty quick to handle my Visual Studio 2010 and C# development activities, and that includes running the built-in web server and SQL Server 2008 database.
I have just one problem that I have discovered: When the display goes into "dim" mode after 2 minutes of inactivity, at the same time both CPU core's max out and stay at 100% (as displayed on my CPU Usage desktop gadget) until I move the mouse or press a key to restore the display from dim mode. I even left the task manager up and running on the performance page, and it also displayed both cores maxed out. Has anyone seen this, or know how to fix it?

 

Mine does not do that. You might try using a program called PROCESS EXPLORER (it's a task manager on steroids) to see what is causing the CPU util to rise.

Also, what if you create a new user account and log in as that user then test it to see if the power saving backlight dimming has the same effect?

 

Well, think about it. The point of encryption is to protect your drive from someone being able to access the data! If you could just remove your drive or boot off a CD and access your data, what's the point then?

 

OK, per your advice I ran Process Explorer and found out that a process called mscorsvw.exe was eating up the CPU upon screen dim.
Here's what I found out from Microsoft on this:
mscorsvw.exe is precompiling .NET assemblies in the background. Once it's done, it will go away. Typically, after you install the .NET Redist, it will be done with the high priority assemblies in 5 to 10 minutes and then will wait until your computer is idle to process the low priority assemblies. Once it does that it will shutdown and you won't see mscorsvw.exe. One important thing is that while you may see 100% CPU usage, the compilation happens in a process with low priority, so it tries not to steal the CPU for other stuff you are doing. Once everything is compiled, assemblies will now be able to share pages across different processes and warm start up will be typically much faster, so we're not throwing away your cycles.

 

But, in your case, it isn't going away??

 

You're not seeing where I'm trying to head with this. I don't want encryption, and I really do need to perform image backups. Where do I go to confirm that the encryption is disabled? I think I'm just going to try making a backup and see what happens.

 

There shouldn't be a problem. They come UNENCRYPTED, obviously, since keys and passwords are required to enable and setup the encryption. Therefore, if you do nothing, it will always be unencrypted and you can boot off a CD or a USB flash drive or what-have-you, and you can read the drive just fine. Sorry if I misunderstood.

 

Yes, it did finally go away. I just had to leave it alone for a long time so it had plenty of "idle" time to finish compiling all those .NET assemblies (I just installed Visual Studio 2010 last night, so this makes sense). The Index Searcher Service is still eating a bit of my lunch, though. I guess that too will eventually catch up.
Thanks!