Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

How much more watts does the 160M Quadro NVS use over the Intel 4500MHD?

How much less of battery life will I see under a 9 cell battery?

 

According to these reviews -> http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-E6400-Notebook.12875.0.html and http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Precision-M2400-Notebook.12624.0.html the X4500MHD-equipped draws 10W and the latter 12W. Don't mind that the latter is a Precision M2400, since basically M2400 = E6400 NVS 160M.

 

Hi everyone,

I want to buy a Dell Latitude Notebook but I have to use Windows 2000 and XP too for some reasons. But for E series Notebooks I only find drivers for XP. It is soo or have someone idea that I can install the hardver elements under WIN2000? For example I choosed E5500.

Akos

 

I just got my e6400 today. I removed XP and installed Vista. I've installed the drivers in the order that Dell recommends. What I haven't done though is install the Intel Matrix Storage driver/manager yet. I just want to know if I risk anything by not installing it?

Thanks a lot.

 

Because I need the laptop, and I'm not willing to do another exchange where I have to waste a month and not have any of the Reps tell me what's actually going on with the replacement unit until 2 days before it arrives. Plus, the unit now is actually pretty good minus the fact that there's a few scratches and this unbalanced bottom.

Cyan, there's no reason not to install the latest 8.8 version from Intel. It'll help make those latency issues go away.

 

If you have Next Buisness day on site service, you can keep the system until you get the new one, swap the HDD (the label to return the machine turned out to be no longer valid, then just contact Dell tech support once more and ask for a new one), and ship the system. This is what I did.

I have it installed, but not the latest drivers form Dell. No issue here.

 

This laptop contains technologies unsupported by Windows 2000 or XP pre-SP2 (must be XP SP2 or newer). XP and win2k are both the same OS. CP was release only a year later than Windows 2000, and feature 2 less service packs to make it the same as the latest SP from XP today. However the same. XP new features are faster boot-up, some few minor things, Welcome screen, new Control panel view mode, new help documentation, and some themes (some options was moved).

I suggest a Pentium 3 800MHz laptop to run both OS as dual boot for maximum compatibility.

Alternatively, you can use Windows Vista (highly recommended) and use Windows XP and Windows 2000 under Microsoft Virtual PC which is offered for free at microsoft.com (that is what I do).

Or

Have dual or triple boor Vista and XP, oand on both have Virtula PC which runs the same virtual machine which has Windows 2000 in it.

Or

Get the latest Windows 7 beta build, as you can have XP windows float around in Win7 like so:
http://gizmodo.com/5226696/windows-7-release-candidate-1s-best-surprise-new-features (second item on the article)
and have Windows 2000 on Virtual PC.

Again, other than drivers, Windows 2000 and XP are identical, oso you waist your time. I don't know which stupid work place you work in, but they are total morons if they force you to use both... let alone force you to use any OS. If I among millions other of programmers can make application that runs on ANY windows form Windows 95 to Windows 8 without any modification, then the programmers that were hired put an if condition in the code, or are less intelligent then a cockroach.

 

the M2400 actually uses the Quadro FX 370 256mb card. I imagine the power draw isn't drastically different though.

come on...really? The guy might work in a large enterprise environment, you'd be surprised what you find in the datacenters at large banks, retail stores etc (I used to work for a couple myself). I still see Windows 2000 servers, NT workstations, and old RedHat 2 boxes all over the place. Companies do not upgrade these systems if they work. Perhaps this guy needs to run an app that is old and will only run on XP or 2000, who knows. It's been painfully obvious that a lot of old, legacy apps do NOT run on Vista. It happens, so you don't need to cut the guys nuts off about it.

pongiakos: GoodBytes did give you some good advice about running virtual machines. Buy your new laptop with XP (or Vista), with 4gb of ram. Install a desktop virtualization product like Microsoft Virtual PC, VMWare Workstation, or Sun Virtualbox, and load up your Windows 2000 and XP development environments there. You can use snap shot functionality to test code and/or back up your VMs. I use it extensively with work and with the developers I support. We run NT, 2000, 98SE, XP, Vista, Server 2003, 2008, Windows 7, Mac OSX, and Linux all in VMs. Good luck.

 

There was no need...I got them to send me a new access panel without any issue. I might not even need to send in the old one apparently is what the tech told me. So score one for Dell Support there.

 

I had both at the same time, although the one with the nvidia graphics has the P8600, and the one with the Intel graphics the P8400. I did measure battery life, by just doing non-intensive things like checking email and surfing the net. Both have the Intel wifi on, and screen brightness was set to 3 clicks above minimum. This is not a scientific test, but I got close to 8.5 hours with Intel, and just a tad over 7 hours with Nvidia, using 9 cell batteries, and just picking power saver plan. I can save a bit more by changing the plan options, so I figure I can get to 9 hours with Intel without too much compromise.

Bottom line? I think there is about 1 hour difference in battery life between the two graphics system, if everything else is identical.

The reviews another poster linked to show a 20% difference in power consumption: 10W vs 12W. Assuming those numbers are right, you can calculate the difference in battery life. The 9-cell is 85W-hours. At 10W, it will last 8.5 hours. At 12W, it lasts 7.1 hours. These are very close to what I measured.