Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Mmmm I guessed so lol... But it means we're still stuck with too many useless drive accesses?

Now that is interesting...

I just upgraded to the latest drivers from Dell and I upgraded the 2 intel IAA stuff (driver and app).

Make sure you close all app, and monitor the resources with the ... you guessed it, the resource monitor. I put my spin down to a minute just to see how it went.

Good news :
After like 5 minutes all the processes that have disk activities are gone;
After that, Vista (business), manage logs and the page file every 1½ minutes or so. Like 3-4 times.
Now my disks have been completely idle for 4-5 minutes.

The constant whipser from this laptop is definitely HDD based. I tought so but I can now confirm. This lappy is dead silent when the seagate drive is off. An SDD must do wonders in this Dell...

Oh, spin up!
Looks like Vista is the main problem. It's logging so many things!
The pagefile is accessed every 3 minutes, even for nothing (I have 4 gigs of RAM)
The one process that is always fired with it has something to with "lastalive0" and "lastalive1". No clue what's that.

After this, every 5 minutes, a round of logging fires. There are like about 10 processes logging (NTFS stuff).

So even though you manage to get a spin down, the drive doesn't stay that way for a long time...

Edit:
One thing that is taxing on the drive is the offline files feature. Even after 10 minutes I booted up, it's still check for those offline files...

Edit2:
The search indexer is another bad boy diskwise . It runs even longer that the offline files scanning... I've been up for another 8-10 minutes now...

 

Hi there,

My E6400 freezes periodically. (2-3 times a day, I'm using the laptop almost all day).

The symptom is, just everything - music, cursor - stops. And then after 2-3 minutes, it works again.

Anybody knows the solution? Help will be greatly appreciated.

I'm using Vista 32 Business, and I clean installed it.

Thanks,

Joon.

 

can you guys point out what are the optimal bios settings? I have seen a thread to switch over to AHCI, but what about all the other settings?

 

I had a similar behaviour, though the freeze only lasted for about half a second. It got significantly better once I upgraded to BIOS A11. Have you done that?

 

I wonder if something is hogging all the system resources to the extent that everything else stops. Looking at the CPU utilisation of the processes in Device Manager may provide a clue.

Consider doing a virus scan and also run something like Spybot.

Did you install the latest versions of all the Dell drivers and software that you need? Some of the earlier versions are buggy (and still not perfect) while software such as Dell Connection Manager is best avoided unless you really need it. Also, did you first install the Dell system software as recommended by Dell?

I've never made a point of trying to optimise all the settings, but it may help to disable anything that you never use.

John

 

@wildrogal, I can assure you that is something is wrong with the machine.
The only "mouse" problem with the Latiture Series is that both laptop mouse doesn't work when Apls drivers are loading for a few seconds... then it works all the time.

If you can resolve the problem at 100%, then contact Dell to get it fix or see for a replacement laptop.

 

More information on DE16 please? I've upgraded to it!

 

I'd say many if not most of us have upgraded. Any info on the subject would be most welcome.

 

It's difficult to say what the cause of your freezing issue is without knowing the system configuration, installed programs and running processes, but we can help locate the cause, then fix it.

In the Start menu, type event viewer, and then select it.

Event Viewer
In the left pane, navigate to Windows Logs and look thru both the Application and System logs around the time the freezing occured.

See if there's any entries in with a red or yellow exclamation point and post back here.

 

Two things to ask / comment on.

I had Elpida memory in my E6400 laptops. 2 4GB SIMMS. This caused the system to BSOD and shut down on me. After replacing this RAM with different RAM all my issues went away.

Question - has anyone been able to get Server 2008 loaded onto the E6400. I cannot seem to find drivers for the Intel 82567LM NIC or the NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M video controller.

If so let me know where to get drivers from

Thanks for the help and for pointing in the right direction on my RAM issue. That was a life saver.

Brewer