E6410 Owner's Thread

1. It will not be easy to change the cooling system. One forum member temporarily installed a quad core CPU and reported no problems. However, that may depend on the workload and the power properties of individual CPUs. Personally, I would be reluctant to move to a quad core since they are no faster at running single-threaded programs than the dual core CPUs.

2. There have been mixed reports about whether the E6410 is pre-wired for WWAN. My E6410 has the cables but some people have reported not having them.

John

 

Okay so I think I kinda figured out the issue with my E6410 though it is going back tomorrow. The only difference was I had changed the SATA mode to AHCI from ATA mode, but I did a clean install. I don't think my motherboard likes AHCI mode, as it hasn't blue screened in ATA mode. Still signifies a major issue so it is going back to Dell for a full refund.

 

Perhaps the major issue is still a botched AHCI mode install.

GK

 

Dude I have done all my installs the same way for probably 1000+ computers, I can assure you I know what I am doing. That and the bottom casing thread shouldn't be stripped, so off to Dell it goes.

 

Something is broken.

Normally it's like this (I know you know.. but for everyone else), for the best possible solution:
- Legacy OS (XP, Win2000, and older) use: SATA mode (can also be called: IDE, Legacy, Compatibility or Emulation)

- Modern OS (Vista, Win7+) use AHCI mode. This means full SATA support. In other words: full speed, hot swappable drive support, eSATA support, and NCQ (Native Command Queue)

 

To add to that:

If you want to install Windows XP in AHCI mode, you need your chipset's SATA F6 drivers. Otherwise IDE mode should install Windows XP just fine. Vista/7 shouldn't have this issues except for RAID (you'll sometimes need the F6 RAID driver).

 

Vista install on E6400 required pre-OS SATA drivers in AHCI mode... back then. Probably still does.

GK

 

No it does not. Vista has native SATA support. My system had Vista originally and I did not need those drivers. You only need drivers when you have any special SATA controllers (servers or has special features), or a RAID setup.

 

Yes, but you need to dust off your old floppy (if it's still work, usually not.. so you need to cash out on a box of uber expensive floppy's), and your floppy drive, to load the drivers. Not worth it. Beside, you having nothing to do with an OS that barely runs on a modern system, as it doesn't even know half the technologies inside, let alone be able to probably manage 1GB or more of RAM.

Heck where I work, we notice massive performance increase by upgrading our early (first-gen) Core 2 Duo's 2GB of RAM Dell systems to Win7 (oldest computer we have), not to mention massive heat reduction, thanks to Win7 power management (as desktops don't really have hardware level power management features... well Dell has them disabled on our system). We are going to upgrade to Win7 all our systems this summer. Boss is please with Win7.

 

You may have me there... I recall pre-OS installing the Intel ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI or ICH8M-E/ICH9M-E SATA RAID controller driver during the Vista install, but the default Vista drivers may have been there, too.

GK