Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Hi Everyone,

I am a college student and I consider myself a highly competent computer user with respect to both software and hardware. I bought an E6400 back in October and have been keeping up with lastest discussions on this forum, hoping to continue optimizing my system. My system is working with the 2.5 ghz core 2, 4 gigs ram, nvs160, led screen, and 250gb 7200rpm hard disk running windows XP; however, it has been feeling quite sluggish recently. I can no longer sense a performace difference between this laptop and my older Inspiron XPS system (which I still use as a dedicated desktop) running vista on a 3.4Ghz P4.

I would like to reformat and change my software setup to maximize performance. What is the most efficient software to install? I feel that my university symantec antivirus corporate is a resource hog, as are the dell control point and other preloaded crap. What can I purge and what is essential?

I've installed all of the latest drivers (& BIOS), and disabled all of the non-essential startup items through msconfig, but windows still takes 3-5 minutes to come to from a cold boot.

Any things to keep in mind during my reinstallation?

 

Thanks for the replies veritas72 and GoodBytes.

 

Especially as you consider yourself a "highly competent computer user with respect to both software and hardware" don't you think you could have given to this forum more than your 6 posts since October 2008?

Forums exists largely due to the quality of their contributors; having said that - reinstall clean after a format, following the Dell suggested install order.

As far as Symantec Corporate AV - even AVG Free is less of a resource hog.

Here's hoping you'll lurk less & contribute more.

 

WinXP requires a re-install every 3 month to keep at it's max speed. That said.
Follow my super super old guide on how to optimize XP properly. I thought and was asked countless of times (or FINE, 9-10 times), to make on efor Vista... but that ended up being useless as Vista does everything for you, every 3 days.

WARNING - THIS POST IN THE LINK IS EXTREMELY OLD:
- I mention about disabling pagefile if you have 2GB of RAM. Today, you need at least 4GB of RAM for XP and Vista (8GB recommended, 12GB for high end computers where gaming and other memory intensive application is needed)
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=1570207&postcount=15
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=1570702&postcount=18
And use Microsoft Bootvis (see online for instructions, I forgot how to use it to launch XP boot optimization). It may be hard to find as Microsoft stop offering the software due to many problems it leads. (In Vista it does it every 3 days)

My system requires 32sec from Windows startup to my account fully loaded with the Latitude E6400 with Vista 64-bit.

 

For reference, my E6400 takes 23 seconds from I push the start button till Ubuntu is fully loaded. However, with a SSD drive, a somewhat faster CPU, and same amount of RAM. Yet I think 3-5 minutes is way too much.

 

Thanks for the replies GoodBytes and Torbjorn. (Ofelas: when an engineering student doesn't have time to browse notebook forums, does it count as "lurking?") Is it better simply to upgrade to vista? As I wrote, I use it on my older Inspiron XPS and there is one single thing that bugs me. I have a few external HDs that I use as redundant backup. Sometimes with Vista, I will eject them properly but Vista will not recognize them when I plug them back in (reports that drive is uninitialized); however if I take it to an XP system, it recognizes the same drive without any issue. This has also happened with different drives on my dad's StudioXPS desktop running vista x64.

 

andersjc: You should contribute if and when you can, but (for me at least) there is nothing wrong with "lurking". I did it myself for a while before starting to contribute regularly.

Vista has better support for modern hardware than XP. If you feel reluctant to upgrade, you have enough room in your hard drive to install both (remember that to dual-boot XP and Vista you need to install XP first).

Since you say that you are a competent computer user, I assume you won't do things like "ooo, that email attachment "bigboobs.exe" looks real interesting, bless this unknown guy who sent it to me! I'll double-click it right away". In that case, you can do as I do, and have one or more anti-virus programs running on-demand only (i.e. disabling resident shield protection). Still, I have tried running my computer with the AVG resident shield turned on, and it is hard to note any difference.

Perhaps a reinstall is in order, and probably Vista is a better option than XP, but you could try just to uninstall Symantec and other unneeded software. You can also run "msconfig" and disable all non-microsoft services and startup items to see if your system boots faster and feels more responsive. If it does, it is up to you whether uninstalling stuff and disabling startup items is worth the trouble or if it is easier to just do a clean installation of XP or Vista.

Finally, a long-shot: by any chance do you use VMware? I used it for a while on XP (until two months ago), and found that it adds some startup services that add over TWO MINUTES to the boot time. If you do, I can show you a way to disable those services and starting them manually (putting them to start "manual" on the Windows Service program thingy doesn't work).

 

Forget VMWare for Windows.. use Microsoft Virtual PC, it works best with Windows, user-friendly AND it's free. VMWare would be the best choice to run a Linux distro for example.

Have you tried Vista 64-bit. Today, it is kinda silly to say this, but it may be left out thing. In the early days of Vista, the 64-bit versions was much more polished and much less buggy, so you can try that. If you don't have Vista 64-bit, just ask Dell (you may need to push and request the supervisor). In any case, you'll use you 4GB of RAM and not 3.2-3.5GB.

I never had any problem with my external HDD which I tried to use via USB and also eSATA, but mine is a self build (purchased enclosure (USB with eSATA) + my SATA HDD). Which is yours? USB or eSATA?

Does your HDD has special "backup" software on your drive? 'cause if so, it might be the problem. However, from my reading of other people comments, is that everyone has issues when you have to plug-in/out several time the HDD with those external HDD's whichever OS you use. That is the best are the software-less drive, or the ones you install yourself on the system.

Did you look for a firmware update on your external HDD?

 

Unfortunately I use it precisely because I need Linux. It wouldn't surprise me if he used it for that reason, many Windows users are forced to use Linux in computer science to learn C or Fortran. That's why I mentioned it. In my case, I need occasionally to use C along with MATLAB (MATLAB can call C programs), and usually I do so to run CPU and RAM intensive programs. When I do that I send them to run on my university's high-spec machines, which run Linux. So I need to make sure those C programs work with Linux.

Yes, I have heard of Cygwin, tried to install it and messed up my whole system. Ended up with WMware at first but now I just dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu.

 

I am in Comp.Sci too! I use Ubuntu under VPC... but does not run well, and the big problem is no file transfer.
I use Cygwin when I program. It should not do anything to your system, it's a simple software like MSN... All you need to do is install packages to make it work, like GCC, or G++, and so on.

You have to make sure you download Cygwin from the official site and use a good server to download the packages. (I the ones in Vermont (vt)) as it's the closes from Montreal (so fast download) and well every packages work. You just need to install what you need with cygwin. You won't get a UI thus.. but a terminal is all you really need.

Sadly when I tried dual boot with Ubuntu on this system, all I got was a OS that makes Vista feels like Win3.1 in height, and only have 3 hours with 9-cell battery. I know it's because I did not have any drivers.. but I can't figure out how to get them and install as in Linux world the concept of "setup wizard" like in Windows does not exits... I got the Video card up and running but that was all. I'll try during the summer once more, as I'll have way more time to play with it.