Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Give it time... Eventually the touchpad will fail (if it's an Alps)

 

As I said, I have a 6 year old alps that works fine - if it fails now it has outlived the screen, left screen hinge, two hard drives, and a number of rubber pieces . I work in IT, and have worked with dozens of D600/D610 laptops with alps touchpads, and have yet to see one fail. I'm sure it happens, but not at an unusally high rate to my experience. I'm sorry you've had bad luck with them, but this does not appear to be relevant to the current discussion.

 

stop hating on ALPS. synaptics fail too. and I have never had any issue with any ALPS touchpad ive had in the last 5 years. and ALPS has been the sole provider for the Latitude series since its inception 5+ years ago.

 

It would be nice if microsoft updated their touchpad drivers to support scrolling then we wouldn't have to worry about the crappy dell drivers.

 

Found out from the IT department where I work that they intend on upgrading several people's work laptops (mine included) to the Latitude E-Series. Originally I was planning on buying an E6400 for my own personal use but with this news I can try out the laptop at work before I take the plunge.

I have a question for people who have owned one of the D800 line of Latitudes. Is the screen on the E6400 brighter than the D800? It's the only thing I didn't like from the D820 that I currently have at work. Other than that, the D820 has been rock solid.

 

Both screens are likely brighter, especially since a D800 would be pretty old by now and the CCFL backlight would be pretty dim by now.

The LED screen (WXGA+) would be much, much brighter. It's bright enough to use outside in broad daylight.

Greg

 

My D800 is over 6 years old, has been my main workhorse machine almost every day since then, and the backlight is still too bright for me when on full, it has dimmed down a little though.

Looking forward to it, but I don't expect to need to use full power very often

 

I've just noticed a hint of a scratch in my right palm rest just to the right of the contactless smartcard sensor icon, parallel to and 3/4" in from the front edge (it's currently too slight for the camera to pick up). I'm 90% sure it is cause by the inner edge of the top part of the display bezel pushing on this point during travel (the left palmrest is currently half protected by a big sticker about regulator information). There are no rubber bumpers on the display bezel itself and the only two rubber bumpers on the chassis are 2 1/2" from the front edge, so there's plenty of opportunity for slight flexing of the top part of the screen when closed.

Perhaps the latch is intended to maintain a small gap when the display is closed. However, it looks as if Dell could do with adding a couple of small rubber pads at about 1/3rd in from each side near the top of bezel. Alternatively they should slightly round off the inner edges of the display bezel.

John

 

In my continued efforts to diagnose the problems I've seen, I disabled AHCI/IRRT and reloaded with XP SP3 from the Dell CD. After loading the various drivers (obviously not including the Matrix Storage since AHCI is off):

• I'm not getting any audio popping, and thanks to the tip on the "PC Spk Mute" setting, the audio through the headphone jack actually sounds pretty good.
• My mysterious whine near or from the HD has disappeared
• So far, the touchpad is behaving fine with the Dell drivers, no ghost behavior.

Obviously the keyboard still has it's odd key behavior, since that's a hardware issue.

Next step is to reload Vista, and see if my whine and audio problems were due to AHCI power management/data control. I also need to try disabling TouchCheck in Vista and see if that helps with the touchpad - I forgot to do that before uninstalling the touchpad drivers (after which I also had no problems, so it's obviously a driver issue regardless).

Also, I think I need to burn a copy of my resource CD, because the DVD drive is vibrating it so badly, that it has scratched the disk in a couple places. That's going to ruin the lens in the drive very quickly as well. The Vista and XP disks have been ok, as they don't vibrate much. Be very careful with any disk that exhibits vibration in this drive.

Despite my various nit-picking in this and other threads, I think I could be quite happy with the machine as long as I can keep it running as well as it is now with XP. I am being extra critical of this machine because I will have to live with not only mine, but many others in the hands of my customers at work in the coming months (and years). I want to report any problems to Dell quickly, and hopefully well informed enough to ensure they can fix them quickly. The discussion and feedback here is greatly appreciated.

 

be careful flashing the bios and attempting to enable TPM in the same reboot - i got stuck in a never ending cycle -- which also may have had to do with the matrix storage (since that is where it would hang). i had to pull off the back and reset the CMOS battery -- dell wanted me to replace my motherboard. what idiots.