Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

If you have the Quadro... check out Nvidia control panel for more options. Your setup is set as clone... meaning wtv appear on your laptop appears on the TV. In this setup the screen with the lowest resolution wins. However, your TV resolution is not really supported by your laptop... so the lower resolution will be picked (that is why your TV is blurry as it goes down to 1280x800, and NOT 1366X768.
You can set you TV as an extended screen, where both screens will use it's proper native screen resolution and your TV will be the extended screen (so you'll need to move application to the second monitor (TV), you do this by a dragging your window on the edge of the screen). In this setup, your laptop screen will be what it's called primary and the TV will be secondary.

On my laptop I have 1366x768!
Open Nvidia Control Panel, on the side column click on "Change Resolution" under "Display". From there move the bar to 1366X768.
Now your TV will be sharp and your laptop will blurry. You can fix that by looking under the section of Nvidia Control Panel "Change flat panel scaling", where you can set "Do not scale"... nwo your picture should be centered and smaller than your screen... BUT sharp.

Note: When you'll get you 1280x800 display, on your laptop the image will scroll when your mouse reaches the edges of the screen, if you use cloning, because 1366X768 si bigger than 1280x800, and LCD displays unlike CRTs, can generate it's resolution... how it works is that the LCD has a grid, where each square in the grid is a pixel containing LCD liquid, which filters out the colors of the backlight to show you a color.

As for your small display... alternatively what you can do, is increase the DPI and set your icons to large (and fonts too). This will keep the definition of 1440x900, and keep the large workspace but everything will be bigger. Checkout Windows Help documentation (Press F1 on your desktop), for all the info on doing this.

 

and the sound issue just came back again! this time the sound stopped because windows event log stopped working...

and it happens again...DHCP client stopped working. odd.

 

I think I'm just as confused after reading your reply haha. Also if I get the Intel integrated graphics card is it any better or worse for outputting signal to an HDTV or external monitor?

 

Good! I like that. Comments like these make me take more time to type them up and improve my posts! Thank you for your comment.

I'll go in FAQ mater, perhaps you might understand better. If you still don't, PLEASE tell me. Don't hesitate!

Q: How LCD display work?
A: LCD is a Crystal looking liquid that is being used to filter out colors from a back light (LED for example) which allows the light of certain color to penetrate and show you a color. Read more on it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal_display
The LCD has a grid... don't beleive me... look closer.. closer.... CLOSER.. like this:

The black lines is the grid. Each cell of the grid contains some of this crystal liquid. Which works like this: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/panel_technologies.htm

As you can see because LCD uses a grid only 1 resolution is supported properly.. and that it's native resolution. That is why on your laptop ALL screen resolution appear blurry except for 1440x900 (on your CURRENT laptop display).

Q: Ok, so why my TV is blurry?
A: You said that your TV resolution is 1366X768... but when you plug it to your laptop... the laptop changed to 1280x800 because the aspect ration of 1440x800 or 1280x900 is not the same as your TV (1366x768). So the video card sends the resolution that the TV can support and the TV tries to modify to best fit its own setup... that is why the picture is strange and not full screen. Remember that your TV is not a computer... it's hardware is limited and not really designed to perform the best fix to the problem (unless you buy one of those super expensive TV's. This explains one of many, the reasons why high-end monitors for computer is more expensive than a TV)
So your bad image on your TV is not because of the video card.

Q: So how do I fix my problem?
A: Set your laptop screen resolution to 1366x768.

Q: Buy why? I mean they are different screens!
A: You need to, because the setup you used is dual screen clone mode. Meaning the video card sends 1 signal that it judge is the best to render both monitor happy (meaning an image will appear).
So unless your TV is at 1440x900 OR your laptop at 1366x768, one of them will be blurry.
A fix to this solution is set your TV as an extended display (like if you have one of those dual screen setups). Meaning your TV will extend your laptop screen. This will allow the video card to send 2 signal, one for your laptop and the other for the TV. To do this, look under Nvidia Control Panel for multiple display settings.

Alternatively, you can close your LCD screen by doing FN+F8 to switch betwen modes... select the mode to have only your TV, will allow the video card to send 1 signal via the Display Port port, to well.. support 1 screen, which will be your TV. SOooo it will be able to output 1366x768 without issue. and your Laptop screen is turned off.

They are many different setups you can do with 2 screen... just play around with the Nvidia Control Panel.

Hope this is understandable!

 

I don't know... But I would always trust Nvidia over Intel, as their market are gamers and/or people with multiple displays, and/or setup media computers with their video cards. And to top things over they offer the best drivers design over Intel.

Intel... well not so much...
But that does not mean that the picture quality will be any different.
If you plan to play HD movies and you want the best playback possible... Nvidia is the way to go, as Intel will probably won't be able to deliver and use your CPU for assistance (which sucks so bad at drawing, which explains the reason why you need a video card).

 

Hi there,

I am a new owner of Dell E6400 laptop (received it last week) and so far the laptop has been great! Got it to replace my old 700m which although has been great for most part of its time, became a bit slow when running number crunching softwares like Matlab due to its single core processor. My latitude now runs the programs, which my 700m struggles with, faster! The spec that I have is 2.8 GHz dual core processor with 1 x 2 GB RAM and the rest are just basic since I dont really need graphics. So far Im very pleased and happy with the performance of this new lappy.

However, a week ago I bought another 1 x 2 GB RAM which I installed this morning to make use of the dual channel mode but to my surprise, the 2nd processor (CPU) speed decreases from 2.79 GHz to 1.59 GHz in cpuz. The main processor remains at 2.8 GHz. I tried running more programs to see if the processor speed would increase, just in case if it decreases becaused I left my laptop idle, but it didnt.

I was just wondering if any of the techies here know what went wrong? When I take out the new RAM, the speed goes back up to 2.79 GHz. Could it be the FSB: DRAM ratio which was set to 2:3? Both rams are PC2 6400 800 MHz. Or is it normal to have the processor speed decrease when running in dual channel mode? Any input on why this is happening? Thanks!

 

The Bluetooth affair: After contacting Dell, I was advised to restore Windows. But that wasn't possible since the oldest restore point I had wasn't old enough. So I did a full Windows reinstall with an Image Backup I had made before.

Still no luck with the BT. So back to Dell to ask for a technician to come and have a look.

On another note, I'm glad Vista Business has the Full Computer Backup feature. It avoids having to deal with third party software that may not be fully compatible with Vista, user friendly or simply good. I regret that lower versions of Vista don't have this feature.

In my case, the image backup including Vista, Office 2007, all the drivers and some other software, came up to 11 GB or the equivalent of 2,5 DVD. Having this backup on an eSATA drive made the process last just a few minutes.

 

Even after reading this? I particularly liked the fix for the GPU problem - just keep the fans running.

The Intel GM45 includes a built-in H.264 decoder. It is also fine for 2D graphics. 3D rendering (for games and CAD) is where it isn't very powerful.

I haven't seen this happen with my P8600 and different RAM configurations. I suggest you get a second opinion by running RMClock and using the monitoring page to see what each core is doing (use the buttons at the bottom of the page to switch between the two cores). The other real life check is to run the wPrime benchmark with the two memory configurations and see if there is any significant difference in the time.

John

 

Firstly, I assume that the new RAM matches the specs of the OEM RAM in clock frequency and timings. If either is lower rated, then the other RAM module is also run at the lower ratings.

Secondly, is the RAM module genuine and of a reputed brand? Ebay is notorious for fake stuff! I'm not quite sure how to test for genuiness but a search on the web should be helpful.

Have you tried using only one module at a time? If the specs are identical, the performance should be more or less the same. If there's a difference you'll know which one to blame.

Finally, you should a benchmark test to test the performance in all the cases. If there's a substantial gain in performance that satisfies you, it may simply be a case of faulty software (RMClock).

I personally feel that a better solution would have been to buy 2x2 GB since the performance gain is much better and also because that they are very affordable now. Maybe it's still possible to ask for exchange from the retailer...

 

The Dell Outlet Just sent me a replacement e6400. They are pretty much identical (other than different DVD burner brands, battery brands etc), but the new one they sent has the T9400 CPU. The old one has the P9500 CPU. I see one supposedly uses 35W and the other 25W of power.
Is this worth fighting or swapping the CPU's? Or will I never notice the difference?