Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

I have already had 2 E6400s since they were released. I first ordered it the day it became available through EPP. I called support the day I received it due to several dead pixels and they happily replaced the comp with a new one.

I have not had any problems with the DVD burner (however I have not yet tried to burn any discs), hard drive, screen (except for the dead pixels), or speakers.

So far I have only had one other problem aside from the dead pixels and interestingly enough it is a touchpad issue but not one that has been discussed here.

If I use the touchpad once I am in windows the Vista busy cursor stops spinning.

The trackpoint does not cause this problem and it only happens when I use the touchpad with the dell touchpad drivers installed. The windows drivers do not cause this problem.

I had/have this problem on both of the E6400s. It occurs in both the factory vista installs and my subsequent clean installs with both the dell supplied vista disc (Ultimate) and my own retail discs (Home Premium and Ultimate I tried both).

From what I have been reading here it seems that most if not all of the touchpad issues (including mine) are due to the drivers and will probably be fixed in time.

I have tried using most of the older touchpad drivers on the dell website and none of them seem to work properly. The trackpoint works with any driver but the touchpad only works with the newest drivers (A06) which are the ones on the drivers and downloads page for the E6400.

 

Wrong.

The touchpad issues are related to the hardware - Alps touchpads are the worst in the industry. Dell made a big mistake by not keeping the contract with Synaptics.

I have replaced all of my Dell's palmrest (touchpad is integrated with them) numerous times due to the Alps pads going bad.....

 

I completely agree that there's no reason to cripple the E6400 (with Intel graphics) on account of 65W PSU.

Here's part of what I wrote in the unpublished annex to my E6400 review:

I've actually got both PSUs with me on my travels since I once had a PSU die on me while far from home and couldn't find any compatible replacement.

John

 

How long has dell been using Alps touchpads? My XPS m1210 has a synaptics pad and I got it in 2006.

 

Well, they were using both. But it seems that they have chosen Alps primarily because I have bought about 3-4 Dell's over the past 2 years and all of them had Alps....

 

Anybody manage to fix the audio popping or get a comment from dell?

 

Anyone else having an issue where the touchpad stops working under XP. it's happened to me at least 3 times already. When it happens, the touchpad doesnt work at all and none of the 5 buttons work, but the trackpoint works to move the cursor. It's fixed after a reboot. I wonder what's causing this.

 

Did you see this thread? Try turning the wireless off. Which GPU do you have?

I've had no touchpad problems at all with XP. I've known touchpad drivers have strange conflicts with other software.

John

 

I have the same problem, and I think I've seen it mentioned by someone besides yourself, but I don't think anyone else has noticed/cared enough compared to other problems. Personally, I don't find it an issue, because that particular behavior doesn't affect my usage at all. I would only mention it in pointing out another sign of the poor quality of the driver.

The problem is absolutely software related - I have uninstalled the drivers and used it for the past day with generic drivers, and all of the strange behavior I had has gone away, spinning cursor included.

The Alps touchpad has been dominant in the Dell Latitude laptops for quite a few years to the best of my knowlege. My 6 year old 600m has an alps as well, and it has worked well all that time (and has a much, much better, and more flexible driver than the current model - this kind of thing happens every time a vendor decides to brand and customize the driver for no good reason).

 

yea the problem (for me) is certainly software related (probably a conflict of some sort), because it definitely doesn't occur when the driver is disabled (tested for 2 or 3 days).