Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Hey from what I know the Seagates are the best noise wise. You shouldn't hear them hum, whine or click. I've been using a 7200.2 in my last laptop and it was quiet as well... silence. Even in an external enclosure I can hardly feel it vibrate. I'm not even joking when I say I have to put it against my ear to hear it.

So probably a drive about to fail... I would recommend putting it trough some benchmarks to see how it goes. In my past experience I've been always very cautious when my desktop hard drive started making an unpleasant whine.

 

Well, she got in and I am pretty happy with everything. Except the sound! Now I know these are tiny little speakers and all, but my old Toshiba had much superior sound quality compared to this. It sounds terrible to me. Plus, Dell forgot to package in the extra a/c adapter I was promised. Other than those things I am pretty happy so far, I just have to get around the whole sound issue. if push comes to shove, I may even mod my lappy to support bigger better speakers, I know I'll draw some criticism, but I just have to have half decent sound. I think my cell phone produces better sound that this.

 

OK, I swear, I wasn't having any audio popping issues, but now, after listening to the laptop almost all day, it's slowly been getting worse over the past few hours. It sounds like poor quality mp3 popping, but these are confirmed perfect files I've listened to for a couple years.

 

Have you guys upgraded to the new firmware? I think they're on revision A03 - It's just a thought - I don't have my unit as of yet...

Also, do you think it's better using the Dell drivers or the ones from the OEM?

L.

 

Just to let you guys know, the new BIOS still doesn't allow the use of 65w power adapters. Though I think the boot through the BIOS is a bit quicker.

I like that new BIOS a lot btw.

Greg

 

Hmm, adding to the touchpad oddities and bugs...

I have had the touchpad on several occasions stop responding consistently - it starts only moving horizontally 2-3 inches, or jumping across the screen wildly. This symptom does not go away with any amount of clicking or switching applications, but does go away immediately when I open the task manager by hitting ctrl-shift-esc. I don't yet know if opening any app would work.

Now, for the more paranormal behavior... I walked away from the machine to grab a snack, then as I walked back over, I noticed it was quickly highlighting the paragraph the cursor was hovering over - it was clicking rapidly with no contact to the machine. I didn't touch it, but watched, until over the next 30 seconds, the clicking slowed to a stop (I actually tried to take a video, but it stopped by the time I got my camera ready).

The sensitivity was at the default level, and the touchpad was clean - it definitely shouldn't have been registering clicks.

 

Soooo...it looks like we have the following issues with the E6400...

• Poor quality DVD burner, very inconsistent operation (so far I have not experienced this issue)
• Erratic touchpad (this happened to me twice so far, I thought I was crazy)
• Poor LCD backlight, keyboard backlight, and ambient light sensor coordination (this is driving me crazy, I don't want my screen to adjust its brightness all the way down every 5 minutes when I told it not to!)

Perhaps I should hang on to my E6400 for another day or two and test a few things in XP. Can you guys chip in which operating systems you guys are using?

On, and it seems these new E laptops are easy to scratch too .

 

Don't forget the audio popping problem (Vista for me), and the complete lack of decent audio in XP.

BTW, I think the touchpad is largely a driver problem, and I'd like to see if there is a generic alps driver that would work better than the Dell one. If anyone beats me to finding something that works, let us know.

 

Then we have this...are a lot of people experiencing the audio issue? Also something I have not heard yet.

• Poor quality DVD burner, very inconsistent operation (so far I have not experienced this issue)
• Erratic touchpad (this happened to me twice so far, I thought I was crazy)
• Poor LCD backlight, keyboard backlight, and ambient light sensor coordination (this is driving me crazy, I don't want my screen to adjust its brightness all the way down every 5 minutes when I told it not to!)
• Audio popping in Vista, poor support in XP.

So far I'm two for two with this list of problems. Enough to make me think a little harder about a new order entirely. I emailed my 'old' sales rep, and told her I had to return the system...and I'm asking her about new prices for the E6400 and also the E4300 now.

I'm guessing I won't even want the E4300, but I'm going to at least ask.

 

Yeah, it was actually one of the first problems mentioned, if you look in the threads of sibling machines (the E6500 and the precisions). The E6500 problem had a thread, and one person claimed it was fixed, though I would like to see more reports.