E6410 Owner's Thread

I finally got through to a supervisor this morning that realized that a huge error had been made. He stated that they had ~ 1,000 E6410's at the outlet currently and less than 20 of them were priced below $1,000.00. I realize we only see about 200, but he stated that there were a number of E6410s on the site that only the CSR could see

We even compared several of the average computers on the outlet to new versions containing the same components and those on the outlet ranged from $300 to almost $800 higher.

The supervisor stated that he couldn't take this directly to Marketing as they didn't even have a phone # that he was privy to. He stated the issue would have to go through several levels of escalation before it would get to the appropriate department to get it resolved.

 

Within the last hour Small Business Outlet prices for the E6410 have been lowered back to a much more normal range.

 

My E6410 with i5-540M can't match the low usage power efficiency of my previous E6400 with P8600. The E6410 is forecasting 6 to 7 hours from the 9 cell battery whereas the E6400 would be offering about 9 hours under the same operating conditions. This is with my Balanced power profile for which I have enabled most power saving features when running on battery. Changing to the Power saver profile may add another half to one hour.

One core of my i5-540M is significantly hotter than the other when the machine is on idle which suggests that the hot core is leaking some power. Perhaps it is a good thing that the E6410 came with a 9 cell battery.

John

 

New e6410 arrived this morning. The 30% off coupon could not have come at a better time, I was going to buy one either way but thanks to the coupon I was able to get a top-end config at a midrange price. Unfortunately it was practically unusable out of the box, but the new BIOS seems to have fixed it. Coming from a long line of cheap consumer notebooks, this looks like a pretty serious piece of machinery. Not many impressions so far, not going to play with it too much until my SSD comes in on Thursday.

 

For what it's worth, I also have noticed that one of the cores on my i5-540m runs noticeably hotter than the other core. Typically, this amounts to a deviation of 3°C to 6°C. I have not been able to identify an apparent contributor to this observation, and any hypothesis would remain pure conjecture, but I have occasionally noticed that the workload is unevenly distributed among the physical cores, with one of the cores typically under greater load than the other. This is not a consistent observation, though could shed some light on the thermal deviation among the CPU cores.

 

Vertex 2 SSD and Deep Freeze not playing nice.

I use Deep Freeze on most of my computers system (C:\) drives as a way of preventing unwanted things from happening.

When I installed Deep Freeze on my HDD that came with the E6410 everything worked fine, but when I installed the Vertex 2 SSD things started acting funny.

Every time I rebooted my computer the Internet Explorer settings would default back to the very default from when you first install it. Settings of other programs would do the same or be erratically changed.

I have never had any of these problems with my other computers running SSD (Intel X25 G1 and Vertex 30GB) and Win7 64bit Pro.

 

I installed the A07 dell driver and also had a problem with the external display port not being recognized. I then rolled back to A05 which works fine. I tried to get the latest version that you guys are running (259.41) but windows 7 64-bit automatically downloaded and installed 189.74. I then tried using windows update and got nothing. The latest dell driver also appears to now only install 189.74. Do you guys mind pointing me to where to download and install this 259.41 nvidia driver? Perhaps a link or slightly more detailed instructions. Thanks.

 

So I just tested the Vertex 2 by doing a clean install on my Desktop with Deep Freeze and no problems here. So it must be something about the E6410 that is causing this problem.

Also, I simply took the SSD out of my desktop and plugged it straight into my E6410 and the same problem came back!

 

Oops, I meant the 259.47 driver (I got mixed up between the last MS WHQL, 257.41). You can find the download via the Microsoft Update Catalog. There is actually a thread in the Gaming forums, but to save you the search, here are the direct links to the 259.47 driver:

Windows Vista / Windows 7 x86 (32-bit)

Windows Vista / Windows 7 x64 (64-bit)

 

Which version of Deep Freeze are you using? We were using the the latest iteration of enterprise version 6 on about 1,000 of the desktop and laptops in my organization and began having similar issues, but not specific to devices with installed SSDs. One of my projects now is to migrate each of those computers to enterprise version 7.10 and that seems to have fixed most of the issues we were having.

If you are using IE 8 I've also heard of issues with it, Deep Freeze, and SSDs. Don't know the particulars, as we still use IE 7 at work because several of the major applications we use aren't yet certified for IE 8. Heck they aren't even certified for Windows 7 so we'll probably be using XP SP2 until we're forced change by M$.