Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

i love my e6400. sometimes i wish i would rather have gotten the 6 cell battery because it would look a little more streamlined, but the extra battery life has come in handy. its definitely a bit on the heavy side, but never has made me uncomfortable.

guess going to the gym often has some benefit for me haha

 

The E6400 is a great laptop but not perfect.
I think the build quality is not that great. The little clip that holds the notebook closed is already broken. This happened when it was closed.
What has also been mentioned is that it gets dirty really fast. You can't keep it clean. DUST AND FINGERPRINTS.
I personally also think the mouse pad is terrible. It works better without the drivers than with them.

Pros+:
-good performance
-good battery life
-nice blue lights
-small
-great looking laptop (when its clean).
-great LED screen
-great keyboard

My notebook got delivered with a SEAGATE hard disk. These hard disks vibrate A LOT. when your notebook is on a table you can hear a irritating noise because of the hard disk.
I now got a TOSHIBA hard disk which solved the problem.

Wierd, could you check your system-event log. Check what error's it has.
Put your laptop in sleep mode. And wake it up. The minute you have keybord input you go to the event-log and check the WARNING and ERROR entries.

After I wake up my notebook from sleep i usualy have 2 warnings about processor being limited.

 

Wow, that is hard plastic and steel (on the screen). My guess is that it was miss installed. It's under warranty you should change it.

Dust because it's black...get an air filter or something. I have no issue here. As for finger prints, you probably have greasy hands, again no issue here.

I would not say "terrible".. I saw terrible. But, let's say I touched better ones. Yes good point.

Another point that I forgot to mention is that the keyboard and palm rest is never hot or warm-hot even when I overclock my GPU.

 

I had mine over 9 months and it has done plenty of travelling. Usually, when I've had a notebook that long then I'm making plans for a new one, but this hasn't happened with the E6400.

• Very nice WXGA+ display
• Good keyboard action and the backlight is very useful
• Solid build quality
• Easy access for maintenance and upgrading
• Very good battery life (P series CPU + Intel GPU)
• Cool and quiet operation
• eSATA + PowerShare USB port are both features I use

Get that lid latch fixed by Dell. Your problem is almost unique.

Dust does show on the black keyboard, but it is easy to wipe off. Black is a much better colour if you work outside because light colours cause glare. I've had no issues with fingerprints. Matte paint finishes are much better than glossy ones.

The touchpad could be better. Personally, I would have left off the trackpoint buttons and provided a bigger touchpad.

John

 

My E6400 has overheating problems with the Nvidia card. Apparently, it's not a widespread issue, and Dell is still working with me to fix it (motherboard and heatsink replacement did not fix it).

 

The build quality is a bit disappointing, at first I thought it may just be an isolated case, but I found another image that demostrates the same build issue (notice the ripple along the top edge of the lid?):

 

My guess is that the base of the laptop is not linked to the heatsink, (the heatsinks site on top the laptop metal base at 2 locations. So my guess it's bad base construct. Of course I am only guessing here.

 

mine had that after 3 mos of usage
when i brought it to dell, they just replaced the top bezel. [took me 20mins of waiting] now, 2 mos has passed, not warp yet. will check on the 3rd month

 

No issue here. This was probably corrected. That site got the Lat. E series very early (before it's released, I even think) from what I remember.
The top edge is plastic, it hold the screen frame, mic and webcam in place. It hold with snaps and 3 screws within the screen frame.
My guess is that they decided to follow the design of the E4200/E4300 series where some extra antenna is place for cellular phone internet thing on them as the screen is smaller on these models so the antenna is well.. smaller as it goes around the screen.

 

That could be it. My laptop came with a deformed chassis, which has been promptly replaced by Dell, but it could have been assembled incorrectly.