Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Others have also noticed the charging problem with the A09 BIOS. It seems that the Express charge mode no longer works. Personally, I don't use it. But I've not noticed a slower charging rate either because I usually have enough time for the normal charge.

Can anyone tell me what purpose the charge interrupt switch (Fn+F2) serves?

 

It switches between charging and not charging the battery. If you use the laptop on an airplane (with power adapter connected) you are not always allowed to charge the battery. I guess the airlines are afraid of exploding batteries.

Also if you are mainly using the laptop on mains power I believe you may improve battery lifetime by switching charging off.

Örjan

 

On the topic of drivers, I had to return to the previous version of the IDT audio driver. The latest one still produced crackling noises and other odd sounds and the STASCV.EXE process was running at 50% CPU for no good reason. I tried the MS Vista HD Audio driver but I found it's not suited to the hardware on the E6400; I need the Rec. Playback device and Skype had trouble recognising the various microphones.
It's not too bad now but I don't understand why Dell couldn't have used Realtek hardware instead of IDT. It's so simple and they still get it wrong! It's not just the Latitude series, but many others too.

 

Thanks, Örjan.

 

No, that is not the case. I have always kept it NOT on express charge. It took it 10 hours last night to go from 6% to 64%. I still havent gotten it above 80% all day. This is either an issue with my battery (unlikely), an issue with the charging connection (also unlikely, though possible), or an issue with the BIOS, and I am guessing it is that, since it appeared roughly when I flashed to A09.

do you have an e6500 or e6400? and when you say others have noticed the charging problem, can you link that? I haven't seen it being discussed. I dont need express mode, but it shouldnt take me 10 hours to get 58%. I havent gotten the battery to 100 since last week.

 

It's a French forum. But the gist of that is that the E6500 seem to have the problem but not the E6400. Some people decided to return to the A06 BIOS just to have express charge again. There too, some complain of slow charging (8hours or more) on normal charging mode.
So far, nobody has found a solution and the discussion seems to have moved on to other things.

 

alright, awesome. thanks a lot vikram -- that is what i was guessing -- and should at least give some sort of ammo with dell. any reports of problems in the forum for those flashing backward to the A06? dell threatened to cancel my warranty if i did that, basically.

 

How would they know what went wrong, if it went wrong? Tell them you were going from A06 to A09.

Anyway, Dell's BIOS updates seem to be quite robust so the chance of a problem is small.

John

 

thank you iisan - i will check it out.

 

My Dell account has changed the order status on my E6400 to "Shipped" as of today, with a delivery date of Monday.

What is the recommendation for the newly received machine? Get all the newest drivers and Windows updates? Or wait and see?