Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

I haven't got around to testing A11 yet, lol. Still have all our systems on A06.

Have you noticed any reason not to have applied A11 (obviously too early to comment on A12 just yet)

Thanks John

I also saw this update available a few days ago. Hopefully they got things sorted out this time around. 90% of the time the FP scanner doesn't wake up with the rest of the system on a resume from sleep/hybernate. Getting tired of those support emails now. I'll have to flash my own system this week-end to try it out.

There was some wonky notes on flashing this update tho (if I remember right). TPM bios setting needs to be changed to ON - but DEACTIVATED before flashing if you've ever had TPM enabled before. I suppose this is to defeat the built in anti-tampering protection.

 

Well, I mean I already bought it with the Nvidia. And I believe it's actually arrived earlier today. And I don't think I can exchange it even if I wanted to since I bought it at the Outlet. I'm not sure why I did end up buying the dedicated graphics. :\

Oh well, I'll see how it runs soon I guess...

 

Sadseh, the Nvidia graphic card is not bad at all.
I think you'll be surprised by how cool the system is.

 

Hopefully.

The two systems I've had before btw are the HP Dv2000z (which I reviewed on this site, with a regrettably positive tone), and currently an Acer Aspire 7520 (my family got it for free around the same time my HP broke down so I just inherited it). Both had a Turion64 cpu, which I'm now starting to blame for the issues. I guess this Dell will decide my opinion of laptops in general since I won't have many other factors to fall back on as scapegoats...

Having an integrated gpu didn't stop the dv2000z from overheating like a mofo.

 

Yeah, don't get me wrong, the GPU might hit 100C in the worst-case scenario, but that doesn't mean the machine on the whole gets that hot at all even at load. It's just not as cool as the IGP model, which is how cool I'd prefer it to be...

 

Have you guys seen the "Dell Latitude E6400 Competitive Analysis"? It compares the E6400 with the HP EliteBook 6930p and the Lenovo ThinkPad T400. Check it out HERE!

 

I'm now running BIOS A12 and tested the fan operation. First, I had to run the wPrime benchmark 5 times to get the fan to come on (at 70C) and the fan cut out again quickly (at 50C) once the benchmark had finished. This is with P8600 (undervolted to 1.05V) and Intel GPU.(These temperatures are THM, not CPU core.)

Then, a longer, but less intensive, load test (wPrime with one core) saw the fan cut in at 65C after about 5 minutes and then stay on until the temperature had dropped to 45C. So, as previously, the fan operating rules combine both temperature and time.

I have to use I8kfanGUI to tell me if the fan is running since the lower speed (~3,000rpm) is so quiet.

John

 

That's a great tip allfiredup! I briefly checked the appendix and although this study was commissioned by Dell, the laptop specs are fair -- all of them use the same processor (P8400) and graphics card (Intel integrated), and base models all have similar HDDs. "Max battery life configurations" all have SSDs. Apparently, the E6400 is slightly superior to the other two laptops in many respects (battery duration and ports being the most important).

Now if only Dell would release some cool stuff for the modular bay... I won't buy the battery slice, but I would buy a modular bay battery. And an HDD caddy for 2.5'' disks.

 

Dell also has a new firmware for seagate HDD (DE17).

 

I updated to A12 and reinstalled the DCP software yesterday. I've had nothing but trouble since then...

First, my system wouldn't boot. I got through the "Dell bootup screen", then the screen went black and the Dell bootup screen came up again.

After undocking my E6400 I was able to boot, get into Windows. I put the laptop back on the docking station, but after a while, my system started beeping and I realised that the "0" and "1" keys were somehow triggered all the time. I opened a text editor and got "0101010101010101010..." I ran the diagnostics, but didn't get any errors.

I now rebooted with my E6400 undocked and up to now everythings fine...

I went back to A11, but that didn't fix the problem... uninstalling the DCP software didn't work any better, but somehow it must have screwed up my Logitech drivers... after uninstalling Logitech Setpoint everythings fine again.