Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

sorry man, i didnt check the forum today/yesterday, i went skiing all day and flew back home that night. do you still need it? send me a PM if so, ill reply faster, i normally check the forum in the morning and at night, but i might miss it.

 

no prob, nope i was able to facilitate them sending out the cd through a dell chat support today. i installed vista 32 on the 'old' latitude that i have to send back in a few days so i can learn a little about vists/play around with it. man its such a pain booting back to factory windows and then having to install the drivers 1 by 1, i already don't know what i'm doing in vista and then to find the applications/drivers and what not is a pain. im not even sure if i installed everything properly... at first glance it seems like it boots up faster than xp and it comes out of sleep/hybernation much faster. i'm not sure how the indexing/organizing of files is supposed to work though.

i intend on spending the next 2 days 'fooling around with' vista to see whether or not i like it and it warrants me to part from xp, my thinking is i will probably stay w/ xp and wait to see if something more universally accepted comes out in the next year or 2 such as win 7 or an alternate OS.

 

yup and i was able to find one with 4gb of ram instead of 2gb and a webcam... im psyched, dell support rocks. they did it all for a swap-out no extra charge or shipping fees incurred.

 

I just did some browsing around in my device manager and realized my DVD burner is the following:

TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-U633A

I read a lot of issues with these in the latitude forum, have any of you encountered problems with this? I suppose I will have to test its worth and burn some media! The only thing I notice is it's very loud, but I rarely load/burn CD's/DVS's, so I could care less. I'm just so happy now that i got the 5400RPM HDD after having that 7200RPM HDD I can hear myself think lol.

 

in case anyone was curious about that whack error i received trying to install the connection manager, it seems after complaining to dell repeatedly, they released another version, which of course does not seem to think that my processor is wrong! (or more likely, care...)

 

From my knowledge I know they are 2 optical drive. The Panasonic one, found on the early Latitude E6400 (maybe the other models too), and now they changed to Toshiba. The Panasonic one is 1.6A versus, Toshiba 1.3A when operating, so you do save a bit of battery life, however the Panasonic one is the speed as the Toshiba, from my tested (because I saw both when I got the new laptop). So, Toshiba one seams the most interesting... right. But the Panasonic one is quiet. I decided to keep the Panasonic.
- When the drive gets power-up, it makes no sound what-so-ever.
- Reads disk quieter than the Toshiba.
- Scan disk quieter than the Toshiba.

Maybe they are more models out there, but this is what I know.

 

Well the one I sent back was Toshiba, but this one as I mentioned in previous post is:
TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-U633A

I believe the brand is actually TSSTcorp. Anyone know about them/this drive? never heard of it before! Like I said though, no problems w/ it, or at least yet haha, just seems loud, but I only use the drive when installing new programs off a CD but rarely have a need to unless I'm restoring my computer. And now instead of burning CD's, I mostly move info to my ipod whether it be music or e-books, thus keeping my need for a DVD burner only for burning the occasional movies now.

 

TSST = Toshiba Samsung Storage Technologies.

 

Yes TSST is Toshiba. If you can get your hand on the Panasonic it's quieter (as mentioned above). But remember that an optical drive will produce high amount of sound when the disk spin... this is normal. There is no miracle here. In fact you might not even notice the sound difference when use the disk. The only major difference is that the Panasonic one doesn't do a sound when it receive power (when the system powers-up, comes back from sleep/hibernate))

 

it may also be worth noting that TSST corp is more likely to end up with RPC-1 firmware to make the thing region-free. (at least from personal experience over the years)

but you may be better off with the panasonic since dell has already released us a firmware for it, which could probably be easily modified for this.