E6410 Owner's Thread

Thanks John, it's faster now!
I changed my habit from hibernating back to normal shutdowns/start ups, as hibernating 8GB takes a while longer, even with a SSD. That's when I realised that there seems to be a small lag at the beginning of the boot process.

 

Or you could leave it in sleep...no delay at boot OR for 8GB, and it avoids 8GB of data being written to the SSD everytime you walk away from the laptop.

 

I also see that problem. What puzzles me is that when I only had 4GB on board, hibernation / resume time depended on the current memory actually being used. With 8GB RAM it seems to take about the same long time even if only a few programs are open. However, in spite of the extra minute or so, getting back to my open programs is invaluable.

I normally avoid sleep. It's hibernate between home and office, between office and home and at bed time.

John

 

I just got an E6410 from the outlet about 2 weeks ago and I'm having trouble with it freezing up whenever the HD is writing. Under normal circumstances it's just a small annoyance, text taking a few seconds to show up after I've typed it for instance. Video is virtually unplayable though.

Specs are:

i7 620m
4GB
Nvidia 3100
SSD (Liteon)

Is there some software setting I'm missing, or am I going to have to send this thing back?

 

Suspicion has to fall on the SSD. How does the Liteon SSD perform? Run CrystalDiskMark and post the results here.

One of our other members managed to persuade Dell to replace the Liteon SSD with Samsung, which is what Dell usually uses.

The other thing you can do is to study process CPU time in Task Manager. Add the CPU Time column (under options, select columns). See what your anti-virus software is doing. It might be over-keen and scrutinise each bit being written to the disk drive.

John

 

Does anyone have pictures of the regatta blue?

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : Crystal Dew World
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 161.220 MB/s
Sequential Write : 34.142 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 98.216 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 31.348 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 6.373 MB/s [ 1555.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 2.465 MB/s [ 601.8 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 11.955 MB/s [ 2918.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 3.139 MB/s [ 766.3 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [C: 32.7% (38.6/118.3 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2010/09/24 10:51:26
OS : Windows 7 [6.1 Build 7600] (x86)

I couldn't get the issue to happen again this morning while playing video. Could a fully charged battery make a difference? I was having the issue playing video last night both on and off the charger.

EDIT: OK it just started happening again, so battery charge doesn't seem to make a difference since I haven't unplugged it. I checked, and there is nothing weird going on in terms of CPU time while it happens. Barely anything is even using the CPU.

EDIT2: I've attached an image of the disk activity from resource monitor. Each spike shown corresponds with a video freeze. Should system be pretty much constantly writing like it is?

 

The write performance of the SSD is poor, even in comparison with my Kingston V+ (rebadged Toshiba HG2). However, by itself that should be causing your system to freeze. I am intrigued that your Resource Monitor's graph has a scale of 0 to 5 for Queue length, whereas mine has a scale of 0 to 0.01.

Go into Device Manager and check the Policies for the SSD. Is write-caching enabled? If not (which is my suspicion), turn it on. Select the top option and rerun CrystalDiskMark. Then also select the bottom option and run again. Here is my SSD's performance with, left to right, no write-caching, the first option enabled and both options enabled.

Dell's photos of the red one look OK to me (I have the red one), so I would assume that the blue is also correctly represented. This means that it is a fairly light blue.

John

 

I'm very interested in purchasing this Notebook.
There is one question i couldn't find the answer to:

Is it possible to use the HDMI and VGA-Port together (I think it's called extended desktop, the Notebook Screen is not used in this configuration)?

The m1330 got no problem with it and I like this feature.

C.

 

I modified the policies as you suggested. That resulted in a marginal performance increase, but didn't fix the freezing. After much searching on google and a completely unhelpful chat with a dell tech, I finally just decided to reinstall Windows 7. So far so good after the reinstall. Sequential writes in Crystal Diskmark are up to 50 mb/s, so the SSD is still pretty slow, but it seems to be working better after the reinstall.