E6410 questions

BUILD QUALITY
How's the build quality on E6410 compared to Thinkpad T410? Creaks, flexing, etc? I'm almost sure this month my next purchase won't be a Thinkpad and Latitude seems to be a good choice. Our office use them. I currently have a 6-year old T41 and 2-year old T61. I'll miss the keyboard and trackpoint but i can live with that.

OPTICAL DRIVE BAY
I have an utrabay HDD adaptor on my T42 does E6410 have the same? I can only see a travel lite module.

6CELL BATTERY
Most probably i'd have the integrated graphics model How will the 6cell last?

 

It's generally pretty solid where it matters and the chassis is a minor update of the E6400. The E6410 does have a trackpoint.

See the E6410 owners thread for some initial impressions.

Dell doesn't make a 2.5" HDD module for the media bay but there are third party solutions. See the sticky thread at the top of this forum. The media bay is the same as the E6400 / E6500.

There are some comments in the owners thread (see above link) but battery time will depend on usage pattern. 6 hours should be possible with a dim backlight while using applications that don't load the CPU (eg avoid any Flash in your web-browser).

John

 

Build quality in the Latitudes are much better than Thinkpads, especially after Lenovo bought them and made them even cheaper. As John said, the E6410 does have a trackpoint, and the keyboard in the system is pretty nice.

As for the optical drive bay, if you have a SATA Thinkpad adapter, it'll work in the E6410 but the edge won't match. You can get an aftermarket one off of Ebay that matches the E6410.

 

I have some questions, too.

1. Does Dell Lattitude E6410 have a freefallen sensor HDD?
Does it have a metalic box to contain and protect HDD [I saw some Inspiron models such as Inspiron 6400 has a metalic box to contain the HDD]?
I used a Lenovo Thinkpad T and I saw that the antishock HDD technology of Lenovo Thinkpad is very effective, and what about Dell?

2. Some people complained about the temperature of Dedicated VGA card in E6410 (NVIDIA NVS 3100M), do you think it's a serious problem?

 

The E6410 has a free-fall sensor built into the motherboard, which gives any HDD free-fall protection.

The HDD is fixed securely into the metal chassis and is protected by the metal base which has some rubber bumpers to provide additional impact protection.

I've seen a few reports of high temperatures with the nVidia GPU. These are sufficiently rare that they may be caused by poor fitting of the cooling system.

John

 

I own one of these (specs in sig) and I can assure you that whilst it's not that cool it's more than acceptable. Compared to many laptops this runs very cool.

 

If you get the Latitude E6410, be sure to take the backlit keyboard. I find it very useful, and is also quieter to type, apparently.

 

Yup, the backlit keyboard has flatter keys and a slightly different mechanism. I prefer it over the regular keyboard as well.