Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

It's not fastening even without the spring. Too bad I didn't realize beforehand the screw wasn't supposed to come out all the way. Lesson in reading the documentation online (since it's not even provided in paper form).

 

Hi all!
New owner here!
Specs on Sig.
Cheers!

 

If it's any reassurance, the screw in my E6400 too comes off the panel. I had a close look at it and it doesn't seem like the type of screw that is retained by the panel. It seems to me that the spring is there only to keep the panel from vibrating in case the screw doesn't tighten completely against it.

Be aware that the manesium alloy used in the chassis isn't very strong compared to steel and care should be taken not to over tighten the screw to prevent damaging threads.

 

It will be interesting to see what the repair shop does to fix it. Hopefully a new screw and spring will be all that is needed but might be more likely the chassis if they used cheap material there.

 

Anyone ave any input on my questions?

Also I want to get an extra 6 cell battery. Are the ones on ebay anygood, or should I only buy the Dell OEM battery?

 

you actually WANT vista to eat up all of your physical ram. If it is being unused, it gets you nothing. one of the ways vista is a huge improvement over xp is its memory utilization. XP would just waste tons of "free memory". If you get too close to "empty" on vista, it will lower ram usage of programs and reallocate, and this is precisely the behaviour you want.

as an example, world of warcraft will eat up a full Gig of physical RAM in vista, whereas I couldn't jump it past 3-400 MB in xp. using more ram is a good thing.

 

I installed Windows 7 an hour ago. Up to know it runs simply fantastic. Up to now I only installed Firefox, Pidgin, Winamp and Nvidia graphics driver. Gonna install the Wlan driver (Dell 1510) in a few minutes, though the connection already works fine with the Windows driver.
Latency is under 500us all the time in idle mode (wasn't the case with Vista), but red peaks (4000-8000us) occur when the hard disk is in heavy use (Mp3+Download+Installation).
I haven't installed the Intel Matrix Storage Manager yet and actually don't know if I should considering that the latency results are so fine and almost no audio cracking and popping appeared yet.
In the device manager there are two devices lacking drivers: Broadcom USH and SM Bus Controller. What drivers do I need to install for these?

PS: the new taskbar is amazing!

 

ill be installing win7 as soon as I ghost my drive. and a note -- using the latest nightly of firefox you do not seem to be able to download win7 -- it stalls on a flash-esque page with a rotating green animation.

 

There's not a lot of difference in either performance or power consumption. I had Vista on my previous notebook but this time around I went for XP to avoid some software incompatibilities that came with Vista.

I don't know.

John

 

Thanks, I'll give it a try on Vista I think. I can always revert back to XP.