Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

hear lots of good things on the E6400, few quick questions,

if I buy this off a US site, and travel to Europe, can I have it serviced here with the standard warranty or will I have to choose a different option?

how far behind is this quadro to the ati hd3470? and is it best to choose with PC card or express card?

not many HDD options in customization, how hard is it to swap?

any current latitude coupons?

thanks!

 

Upgrading the RAM and hard drive are VERY easy on the 6400. One screw and the whole back plate slides off. Two screws and a bracket screw to replace the hard drive. I've swapped drives in and out of mine probably a dozen times for testing; the only issue is potentially stripping screws.

Best bang for the buck (in my opinion) is buying a refurb from the outlet. Same 3-year warranty as new, and the model has only been out for 3-4 months, so at most your machine is 4 months old.

Keep an eye out on eBay for latitude outlet coupons. Most outlet coupons are XPS/Inspiron, but every now and then they'll throw out a 15% off coupon for small business models.

When I bought my 6400, I got the base CPU, Intel graphics, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, backlit keyboard, 9-cell battery for under $700 delivered. Looked brand spanking new.

Dropped in a 4GB RAM kit and Intel SSD for a nice screaming little machine for under $1,300 total cost.

 

agreed on all of this. if you are soft and manipulate dell, you can get whatever you want from them. you can be harsher on chat support, but on the phone, talk to hardware warranty support, and if you say the right things, they'll give you whatever you want.

 

So I've had some BSODs following the installation of the new NVidia 185.20 drivers. They seem quite random: everything is fine for a few days until all of a sudden my machine no longer boots, but BSODs before logon. I am running Vista x64.

I have finally managed to analyse the minidump file, and it appears that the BSODs are in fact caused by the webcam driver, QA001Vid.sys. I am running the latest version from Dell and I haven't tried installing the one from Windows Update.

Has anyone seen similar behaviour?

 

Try the Windows Update one. I've had no problems with it in Vista or 7.

Greg

 

how are those 6 cell batteries of ebay? They say they are all genuine but i doubt it as they ship from china.
They cost $60-70 while original from dell is $169

I have 9 cell, and looking for smaller one 4-6 cell to reduce weight when carriyng laptop around and when battery life is not important.

 

Yeah, I did, which is why I have been asking people to check the minidump files before blaming them on the video drivers. I disabled my webcam entirely, but I do believe that the windows update one MAY be okay.

 

The Webcam driver provided my Windows Update messed up my "Standby" and "Hibernate" - none of them worked until I rolled back the driver to the one on the Dell site. I didn't have any BSOD. I'm running WinXP Pro 32bit.

 

i now have another problem. this is my second E6400 - Dell exchanged my first one.

when i'm moving the sceen for- or backwards i get ripples at one specific point on the right side of the screen.
here is a small (<1MB) video: Video E6400

I wrote an email to Dell and they told me if i wanted they would exchange the disply and the top-cover. Should i let them do that?

I`ve got the LG LED Screen and i'm happy with it. Don't want the Samsung.
And i had some really bad experiences with "repairing" my E6400 - because of that it was exchanged afterwards....

 

Upon further inspection, I have a minor flaw in the stripes pattern on the lid behind the screen. It is only visible from certain angles and with some lighting, but when it is noticeable it looks like as if the lid is scratched.

Since everything else is working fine (some better than I expected, such as graphics performance), I don't think I will ask for a new one. There is a portuguese saying that translated to English is something like "the good is enemy of the perfect". It applies here -- the laptop is working fine, so I won't replace it. I know too many people with BSODs, failing hardware, poor build quality etc. And many more scratches will come, I guess.