Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

See part 2 of my E6400 for a comprehensive set of benchmark results which you can compare yours with.

I wouldn't do anything special unless you see there's a problem. Run on the battery while doing something and, at intervals, take a note of the time and charge remaining. If the results look uniform then the battery is OK.

I had noticed that MSM tends to mess up the IDT settings. I'll give the new MSM drivers another try in spite of the high latency.

John

 

I don't know about with Vista, but with XP the Dell ControlPoint components together consume hundreds of MB of memory, many of them are un-necessary depending on how you use the machine ...

 

Review my 'clean install' note below to see that I left off the DCP Connection and Security apps, the Intel Matrix Storage Manager app, the modem digital line detect startup thingy, and perhaps some other stuff... and still had only 10MB out of 2GB physical RAM free at idle. The jump to 4GB (2GB free at idle) has made everything much snappier and may have eliminated some lag I has seeing in IE and WMP (this RAM performance improvement was noticed before installing the latest SATA driver). Recommendation: Order a Vista E6400 with 1GB and have 4GB waiting to install.

I got the 4GB OCZ from amazon.com for $45! Amazing. I can remember paying $1600 for 4MB RAM in late 80s.

GK

 

Has anyone found compatible 8GB kits for the E6 series?

 

A pair of the 4GB modules from the Crucial memory selector should work fine, but so should any other 4GB DDR2 PC6400 SODIMMs. They don't have to be from the same source.

John

 

John,

The prices on Crucial is comparable to Dell's online prices in Norway so I'll probably end up buying from Dell.

Kingston is almost double the price of Crucial.

Regarding the Latency issue, did you try selecting High Performance power plan?

I have no audible issues (no dropouts) unless there are tasks running at almost 100%, I do register the issue of red spikes using DPC Latency Checker in Vista.
Windows 7 is actually much better and there are just a few spikes even in Balances/Power save mode.

edit:
This is with both eSata and optical drive connected.

 

Are there any free programs that I can use to monitor my power consumption while on battery? I used Battery Mon for awhile but I'm a student and was too cheap to spend any money once the trial ended.

I've been using a kill-a-watt meter while plugged in and the lowest i've gotten so far is 17 watts (LED screen and NVS160m).

 

At the moment the modules are expensive. If you could wait a few months they will become more affordable.

Yes, I tried that. However, I suggest we try to keep that discussion in its own thread.

If you are running XP then MobileMeter will draw a nice graph of power drain / charge.

Otherwise use the battery info page of RMClock which shows the current power drain. RMClock will also show CPU frequency and load, etc, on its monitoring page.

John

 

Looks like the lowest current that my configuration will draw on battery is about 12.5 watts (w/ T-series processor, 160m and LED screen, wireless=on).

 

Backlight on minimum?

Try no wireless / Bluetooth, no web browser, backlight on minimum usable, no no connected devices. Also try the Power Manager options in Dell Control Point.

Just to see how low you can get.

John