E6410 Owner's Thread

Yep... Three fingers on the touchpad does it. Now it's disabled, thanks.

 

This is the worst piece of garbage, nobody should spend a dime on this useless paperweight.

Several of these (over 5) have recently failed with all kinds of hardware issues such as LCD inverter gone bad, HDD sectors unreadable/blue-screen accompanied aside from the ones where you open up the brand new box, run through the windows installation then try to use excel only to find that the junk is as unresponsive as a corpse. Not just any corpse... one that has been dead for a few days already.

Dell refurbs are worse than the originally failed laptop, same for printers, just all around avoid Dell at all cost! Fujitsu and Toshiba actually pay real engineers who think issues through and design something that works as opposed to getting the lowest bid for a contract to make x number of "lcd inverters" for example. If I were the maker of LCD inverters and had the lowest bid, more than likely I would not be too concerned with QA as much as getting paid for quantity delivered.

 

^^ Maybe it's the user that's defective and needs replacement, the E6410 is a great machine.

 

lol, quite possibly! Only problem is that these were deployed across a company with thousands of employees and out of that large pool of prospective users an unlucky few received these "great machines" and several of them (at least 5 out of the last 10 deployed) had severe unrepairable issues where no OS flavor or image has made a difference yet.

I was not always the one diagnosing them either so we can exclude the possibility of me "sabotaging" them. Maybe Dell is better in other countries but here in the US it is amazing that Dell remains in business.

If anything, they are selling the idea of a laptop/printer - you think you are getting what should be worth however much meanwhile what looks like aluminum is zinc/magnesium and what appears to be a laptop is in fact an array of carefully placed bottom-quality pieces that are just enough to get past the ridiculous 21-day return policy where Dell starts counting from day of purchase but does not ship until two weeks later giving them all but just about one week where the pile of junk they sold you needs to appear to work.

To be fair, Optiplex and Precision desktops have been trouble-free as far as I have experienced for the last year.

 

Given that the LED backlit displays used in the Latitude E6410 do not use an inverter, I wonder what model of computer you are really complaining about. Evidently not the Latitude E6410.

John

 

Backlight "controller"? Whatever word the self-diagnosis software uses for the module between DC power and light emitting component.

I think I posted once before in my life in some forum many years ago. I don't mean to spend time describing my experience with E6410s just to upset those who may love it. Perhaps it was 2 consecutive bad batches that I was unlucky to have come across? Be as it may, although my level of frustration with Dell is at an extreme and my posting was not the most scientifically informative, I do mean well and my intention in none other than to report that there is another side to this product which may be isolated to units manufactured in August and July.

If anyone is interested in further details or wants me to run whatever on the defective units, just let me know and in order to make a meaningful contribution I will take time to throughly provide data. Maybe someone else has run into e6410s that perform extremely poorly especially with excessive HDD read retries/CRC errors and SMART even declaring HD as failed?

Another useful bit of info is that this has happened on hitachi and western digital HDs, so perhaps controller might be the issue?

 

We have 1000s of E6410s across the enterprise here and we have had no problems with the laptops themselves. However it is true, there have been a couple bad HD batches (mostly Toshiba drives, how is that for irony?). But dell replaced them overnight. Dell doesn't make HDs, so they depend on the drive makers to do what they do.

 

That's nice to know...

Dell could QA the machines by running auto-diag/test .... within 2 hours they'd find the bad HDs. Unless specifically asked and approval obtained, replacement parts usually are refurbished.

I have to agree that the overnight shipping is pretty awesome!

 

Well, dougjr15.
Dell probably produces several million of these laptop... you are bound to have some manufacture error here and there. I guess you where simply unlucky.

 

You can't expect Dell to run 2 hour diags on everything, spot checking sure. But Dell will replace the drives overnight.

Our enterprise moved up from the I5-520M to the I5-560M, 2 whole speed grades. I have never seen us jump two speed grades before. Procurement usually looks for the best thing at a predetirmined price level. So looks like prices are coming down on the Enterprise Volume level ahead of the Sandy Bridge announcement.