E6410 Owner's Thread

Can anyone tell me the differences between "Dell fast charging" and "Standard" ? which is better for the battery ?
( the modes are in BIOS)

 

Dell ExpressCharge is as it sounds and charges up the battery very fast to about 90% (like 1.5hrs or less to charge from 0 to 90% or something) and the last 10% takes like 2hrs to charge. This is great for those quick downtimes like during airport layovers where you have 30min or so to charge your Latitude it'll give you like 30% or so to last you the flight.

However, the con is this "fast-charging" tech wears down the battery cells faster so over time the battery life will diminish more quickly than if you were to just use the standard charging (but with standard charging it'll take like longer to charge the battery. So your call if you don't mind spending the $140 or whatever for a new battery sooner for the convenience of "fast charging".

 

New here. Just received my E6410 (i7-620M, 3100M, WXGA+ [AUO], 500GB HDD) yesterday. I have lots of early impressions and will post in detail if anyone wants. But first I have two questions.

1. One of the first things I want to do is drastically reduce the size of my C: partition and make a new partition out of the newly available space. Windows 7's Disk Management won't let me reduce it very much; apparently files are already scattered around the disk surface. I have Partition Magic 8.0, but it's over a year since I last used it and am not sure it works okay with W7.

What's the best way to do this safely? How about GParted Live?

2. I have read some (about half) of the previous posts in this big thread. I see a lot of complaints about the Dell ControlPoint software. Now I can complain too. This sw is, every so often, using 25% or more of my CPU for no apparent reason when the laptop is just sitting idle. It makes the laptop and the AC supply get quite warm. I ended its process with Task Manager, and my CPU usage went back to 0-1% as it should be. If I uninstall it (which I want to do right away) can I get to all the settings it provides through other W7 means like the regular Power Options control panel?

Thanks,
John

 

Dell Control Point has 2 software in one (they both startup with Windows, but you only need one of them). The first one is the big one, probably that's the one that causes problem. This one is the full interface panel.
The second one is light and does the special keys, and onscreen notification and make everything work. In my case, I removed the big one from startup (as you can always start it up from the start menu, or Fn+F7). The small one is the one in the "Startup" folder in the Start menu.

If you remove it, you will lose most of the keyboard shortcuts, on screen notification, lose Dell extended battery life feature (you wont' be able to cut power on your optical drive, media card reader, firewire, etc.).

The E6400, E6410, E6500 and E6510 uses the same software, but are different versions. I recommend to uninstall your Dell Control Point, head over the E6400 driver section, and get Dell Control Point (no need for network and security add-on), and install it. For me, Windows 7 64-bit, it runs perfectly without issue.

 

Update: Dell replaced the LCD for me. It took approx one week to ship it back and forth. I am quite satisfied with dell's service.

 

I just reinstalled my E6410 with a clean install of Windows 7 Professional (my E6410 came with a vista install).

Now that i installed my multi-touchpad driver, my track stick doesn`t seem to work very well anymore. When i touch it, the pointer goes in different directions but not the one i`m pointing to.

Anyone experienced this before? It has to be a driver thing because it worked fine before I installed the newest driver from the dell website.

Edit: I rebooted again and now it seems to work... nevermind

So far I`m really happy with my E6410. I had an E6500 before but i spilled wine over it so the motherboard was broken. It was time for an upgrade anyway, so i bought the E6410. I`m really happy with the small design changes and the fact that it`s a little smaller then my E6500. And i have to say the screen is a big improvement over my E6500`s screen (which was CCFL). Great notebook so far!

 

Thanks GoodBytes for the info on Control Point.

[Replying to myself. ] I used the free GParted Live software, which I burned onto a CD-R, to do the partition resize. It worked quickly and well--no problems.

 

I make a folder called "stuff", and dump everything in, wtv you name is in there, no sub-folders. So much easier

 

Is there anyway to improve battery life? Im barely getting 4 hours. Its more like 3.5 hours.

My specs are
i7
nvidia nvs3100
4 gigs of ram
7200rpm hdd
64 bit windows 7
6-cell battery

Ive turned my monitor brightness to the lowest possible setting and ive turned the backlit keyboard off. All im doing with the laptop is surfing the internet and typing notes.

 

seems about normal to me with the i7, 7200 rpm drive, and NVS3100