Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Just installed Windows 7 Build 7000 on the E6400 with Intel graphics. It is an upgrade over Vista 64. Everything is working, except the LCD cannot be set as bright as previously. Also, when I use the function key to adjust brightness, the little window shows the brightness setting, but it is always in the bottom couple of steps. I can see the brightness increasing, but the slider does not move to the right. Anyone sees this problem? I have the latest Dell drivers, and the updated Windows graphics driver.

 

You should upgrade your Win 7 version. The latest one out is 7048. It fixes many of the problems found in earlier builds and makes the OS more stable. I don't know if Microsoft is officially distributing it at the moment but you can get it by torrent.

 

Well, after a couple of reboots and wakeups from sleep, the brightness is back to normal, and I have the same brightness control as before. Strange.

Downloading 7048 build now.

 

i tried installing the audio driver update but does not work since i am using windows xp pro, it says not available for your OS. Is there an update for XP to add the EQ options to tweak the sound?

Furthermore, with the Control Point software, I notice Dell Control Point and Dell.UCM take up a lot of system resources and pack quite a big punch of hard drive space on my E6400... what exactly are you supposed to benefit from by having these active? Can you remove them? I don't need it to manage my battery and wireless searching, etc. it seems redundant for most of the features in there, you can use other applications to control...

 

also make sure you don't have your cell phone with bluetooth in 'on' mode, if you have the cell phone and the laptop both 'active' as bluetooth devices, there will be a conflict, you need to turn off 1 or the other to use either one...

which brings me to a new questions...

can i have a bluetooth headset on and in use through my VOIP and also have a bluetooth mouse and maybe a bluetooth external keyboard? is there any limitation on the amount of devices? would there be conflicts? at a minimum i'd like the plantronics headset and a bluetooth mouse... thanks.

 

yup, as long as you pair one at at time, itll be fine. if they are unpaired and roaming they'll interfere

 

thanks for the info about the new drivers. sound sounds better i think.

what do the enhancements in the sound properties do?

 

The BT card is set to "Not Discoverable".

AFAIK, there are no new 2,4 GHz devices nearby or any other changes in the environment.

I finally had the time to look at the Event viewer and found a problem with the BTHUSB. It's Event 17, "The local Bluetooth adapter has failed in an undetermined manner and will not be used. The driver has been unloaded."

And Event 18, "Windows cannot store Bluetooth authentication codes (link keys) on the local adapter. Bluetooth keyboards might not work in the system BIOS during startup."

And Event 16, "The mutual authentication between the local Bluetooth adapter and a device with Bluetooth adapter address (00:23:7f:10:8d:90) failed." The MAC address is my BT headset.

Event 17 has occured many times in the past 4 days - around the time the problem started.

Should I just call Dell support and ask them to repair it?

 

Ok I just found a carpal tunnel postponement solution for everyone using the touchpad! I don't believe this was posted yet in the forum and I'd like to think I'm the first person who discovered this lol:

*To enable mouse-like click wheel SMOOTH-SCROLLING:
Press the left and right touchpad buttons simultaneously to activate the control (works best if you press finger in between both buttons). Now all you do is move your finger along the touchpad (no need to click buttons to move up and down web pages, excel files, etc.) ... and it goes very smoothly just as a nice logitech mouse click wheel!

I hope this helps all of you in your battles for daily ergonomic improvements.