Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

no, and it has happened a few times to me. Download speedfan, run as admin to install, and again as admin to run. go to the harddrive status, and get a full SMART report on your drive (that is the only component that could get hot enough to be damaged by the laptop-in-bag scenario)

 

I returned my CCFL latitude from the outlet and I'm reordering one with the LED backlight. Hopefully, they actually give me an LED backlit unit this time. I'd be mad if this happened for the second time.

 

Just ordered a Dell E6400 today. The order confirmation says "Light Emitting Diode" and it also says "Liquid Crystal Display"
J361H 1 Module,Information,Cover,Back W/LED,Liquid Crystal Display Black

GN303 1 Module,Liquid Crystal Display 14.1WX+,Light Emitting Diode Secondary,Roush/heelys
I am confused! I asked for LED display. Is this LED or LCD?

Also, can anyone tell me how long does a 9-cell battery last after 1 year of use? I mean, after 1 year of degradation, how long does 9-cell can run your lapptop for? Will it give 4-5 hours?

 

My e6400 repeatedly hangs whenever I go to full screen display on some websites for video or slideshows. For example on Flickr full screen slideshows and now I 'm trying to watch a webcast at full screen and the video freezes. When I go back to the small display, all is normal. Running Window XP Pro.

Anyone else experience this?

Mike

 

LED BACKLIT LCD. it is both.

 

Ok, let's go slowly on this one:
Light Emitting Diode.... OMG, it does LED!

Second word group:
Liquid Crystal Display. Now that one does LCD. Isn't it cool. Just fouling with you

They are 4 famous computer monitor used today.
- CRT, which died out a few years ago. These are the ones with the big tubes that trows ray of light onto a glass, where you see an image on the other side of the tube (outside, meaning your perspective)
- LCD, which is what laptops have today among most computer screens and TV's. The big advantage is that it require less power than CRT's and is thinner
- Plasma, very rarely used with computers, but still used... it is most likely to be used as a TV.
- OLED, new screen technology used in most cellular phones. This technology it getting significantly better with a wide view angle, better color accuracy over LCD using TN panel technology, and fast response rate. It is inexpensive and is applied like paint. So production cost can be and will be eventually cheaper than LCD, and hopefully the death of dead-pixels confused. It is also a flexible screen, and can be almost paper thin.

- CRT's on laptop would make your laptop look like this:

Hmmm.. portable..

- LCD's is what you will have on your laptop.

- OLED, is what you see in some science fiction movies, and some high-end cellular phones, I was told. You can see OLED screens coming along quiet nicely year after year in several expositions. The technology is quiet not there yet for mass production, as their are still things to do to make it bigger, more precise, higher resolution and be able to compete with LCD's screens; so maybe in a few years.

Now, where LED comes into play? Simple! LCD is exact like electronic watches and your calculator. Just with, instead 1 color... you have 16-bit (~16 millions) of them, and a lot more pixels, which are actually squares. However, these things are hard to see under low light... or when you have color around what you see, then you really need more light to see the image, let alone color. So to fix this problem they use a or several lights behind the screen and use a special plastic film to try and spread the light evenly. Without such plastic film, the screen will look like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvXleDSkB-g&feature=channel_page
With, in this case, 2 LED's that glare your eyes, instead of a nice even light.

Now, as a source of light, LCD screen used to use a CFL lamp. This lamp is not true white. It's usually produces blueish or yellowish light. And this is where LED comes a along. Now, not only LED's use less power, they require no transformer to power up (so one less component to pay, replace and worry that it breaks), and they produce a very close to white light (the more white the LEDs are, the more expensive it is to produce one... so don't expect pure white, but something really close, MUCH closer than a CFL light can ever produce. Oh and the LED's takes less space, so theoretically a thinner screen.

Now, I did mention "TN" on the text above.
What is TN? TN means twisted nematic... and it doesn't have to do with anything twisted as a end result product compare to the other LCD technology. It is just how the liquid within each cell is beeing managed, same applied for other technologies that I'll explain in brief later on. So yea, it's a screen technology, which dictates how the arrange the liquid of each color within each pixels or your screen.

TN panels are great for movies and games, but has poor view-angle, poor color accuracy and poor vividness of colors. But it's inexpensive (ie: that is why your desktop LCD doesn't cost 1 500$ for the low-end model), and is well "good enough" for the average user, which surely do enjoy watching action movies and not have a color blend that makes you think you took acid. I am exaggerating of course, for the sake of humor (sadly not the "poor" part). To compensate on these down side, companies uses different ways. One of the ways is too stronger and more lights... usually done on desktop LCD's. Or to save money and prevent the modification of any machinery, they change the plastic film on your side from an anti-glare one to a super glossy one. Glossier the plastic, the more it is prone to see and do scratches (in general, for LCD's), and of course be more like a mirror, but you have more vivid and brighter colors, as well as wider view angle as you have nothing that spread the light (texture transparent plastic). As long as you go "Oh WOW!"in the store and you buy it, companies are happy. But heavy computer users and professionals prefer anti-glare screen, and this is what the screen of this laptop offers. Now laptop screen suffers the most with anti-glare plastic films as you can't put more or brighter lights as that would kill battery life... The real solution is to use a glass sheet with anti-glare coating on, like computer CRT monitors. The problem is that glass is heavy, expensive to produce, increase transportation cost and packaging material, and well thicker, so that option is left out, especially that TN panels are not great to begging with.

You also have IPS, MVA, PVA and ASV technologies. They all have their strength and weaknesses. These displays offers near perfect color accuracy, amout just as good as our dear old CRT monitor, with no backlight bleeding, great view-angle, kick- color pallet.. these are true CRT quality image but in a thin panel. However, these panel have the WORST response time... you can even see ghosting when you move your mouse. It's not really designed for movies and gaming. And they are SUPER expensive. A descent 22inch model can easily cost 2000$. Do they use glass screen? No they don't, the screen is already really expensive as it is.

But Apple has a glass screen! No they don't. It's just a glass sheet put IN FRONT of a normal LCD screen with it's own film. This was done mostly for marketing reasons. And the glass use is not true glass... it's a mixture of different material, including transparent plastic.

For more info on these technology and full names:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT_LCD

 

I'll tell you in November, and if I remember
I THINK, it should last 4-5 hours, based on the battery life I lost since November.

 

Which GPU? Intel or nVidia. I (Intel graphics) was getting occasional (every few weeks) BSODs when browsing some graphics on a CD and the Microsoft error reporting advised me to go to Display Properties > Settings > Advanced > Troubleshooting and deselect Enable write combing. That was only a couple of weeks ago so it is too soon to be sure if my problem is fixed. That setting might be worth a look.

John

 

Intel Integrated GPU. I'll check those settings and see. It is 100% repeatable for me on Flickr so easy enough to verify. Thanks.

 

Reps point coming your way. Thanks for all these details For some reason, I (had) assumed LED display means OLED display. I didn't realize it's LCD with light source changed from CCFL to LED. But now I do, and I understand difference between all these kinds, thanks to your post!