Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Woohoo! My workplace gave me a brand new E6500 today. I haven't explored it at all yet other than turn it on. How does one determine which kind of screen I have again?

I'll be doing a "First Looks" review of it this weekend.

 

Device Manager > Monitor > Properties > Details > Device Instance ID. Look at the strong after DISPLAY\.

BTW, the E6500 owner's lounge is here.

Or should we have a joint lounge for the two models since they have so much in common?

John

 

Dell has basically said that if I don't ship back the first E6400 today, then I'll get charged for it. And Dell failed to provide a label for a few days......so why are they are my case for not sending things back...?

So I'm going home and I'm going to try to snap as many pictures as possible, but I am not going to be able to get pictures showing the two monitors hardware calibrated.

I can only get pictures showing the LCDs as configured by default, and then comment on if the calibration on the new SEC screen improves the situation.

I cannot say that I have been very satisfied with Dell recently...great notebook, but once again poor service from after-sales support.

I snapped some LG v. SEC pictures (only a few) when in BIOS so I could guarantee the same LCD brightness settings since DCP seems to know what you want to do more than you do.

Anyway, got pictures comparing min and max brightness. I also got a zoom in showing how the SEC colors are not as...well...saturated as the LG screen. that might be why the SEC does not seem as bright. Hardware calibration is the next step.

Update (I'm going to merge my posts shortly):

If you only had one hour to compare two different E6400's (screen and keyboard different that's about it) what would you compare.

I have but an hour to snap pictures and stuff....get posting!

 

This screen problem is such a dissapointment ... I've gone full circle, LOL ... I've went through Dell's, Lenovo's now I have a new Z and love it!

I need to buy another notebook with a larger screen, I'd like something with a screen as good as the Sony Z in a 14/15" notebook ... I'm learning that's not possible?

We considered a T400 or T500 after reading about the screen concerns over there it wasn't worth the risk/hassle to gamble over getting a fair LG screen or a poor Samsung screen.

Reading here it's the same problem

Is it possible to get a 14/15" notebook with a realy nice screen in any brand?

Tried the Sony FW with the Eco screen for a few hours, didn't like it, plus the notebook was too wide/bulky ...

A 14 or 15" Sony Z would be amazing

 

The Sony BZ might be worth a close look. It has 15.4" WXGA+ with LED backlight.

John

 

Wait for the Precision M4400 to get the RGB LED screen option. It should be just as spectacular as the new Sony AW 18.4" RGB LED screen.

I have been told that the supplier for the RGB LED screens is the same for Dell and Sony, so here is to HOPING!

cheers

 

My E6400 (with XP) BSOD'd today while I has having breakfast. Unusually, there was a blank blue screen with no error message.

When I restarted the computer it was very slow. RMclock revealed that the CPU was being throttled, in spite of being connected to a 90W PSU. For reasons I have yet to figure out, the E6400 manages to disable the RMclock power profile, but once I enable my performance on demand profile in RMclock then I get the performance back.

Other people must be encountering similar problems from time to time and wondering why their expensive computer is so slow.

John

 

I've had the odd BSOD with my E6400, it's happened when I used the optical drive. Twice I believe, but aside from that, all of my discs have burnt and worked fine. Right now that is 2 DVD's and 2 CD's.

Greg

 

No problem with BSODs...? Knock on wood.

Well, I failed in my attempts to get the E6400 in the mail by yesterday. So it'll get shipped out today or tomorrow, probably today.

So I have a little bit more time to compare the SEC and LG screens. Ought to make for an interesting review.

As for the XP/Vista battery life...I'm hesitant now to claim the difference is very great. Because once I installed a few background programs (Norton 2009 anyone?) battery life seemed to fall off in XP+NIS to what Vista+NIS was. More research will have to be done here to confirm anything, but I'm thinking it might be Norton that is the battery drain.

Just a follow up to a few things...

1) The keyboards are sourced from the same manufacturer, just different model numbers.

2) I'm recording VID/TEMP info in both notebooks.

3) I was able to narrow this down, I think it flickers only when at 40Hz in 16bit mode. UPDATE: Someone please set their SEC screens to max brightness and then look at the screen from below and to the left. It flickered for me there too. I'm thinking once you get too far away angle wise, or two low powered, it flickers.

4) Yes, HDD was the same when I tested for battery life. I swapped the drives between the two. Problem is that I haven't found enough time to completely kill the battery so I'm going off of estimated life left at the end of the day. Yes, my laptop lasts all day at college with few exceptions.

5) I'm about to sneak a peak at Christine's D820 and see if this module fits in her notebook...UPDATE: The "travel module" that I received is NOT for the D-series Latitudes, not even a close fit. I think Dell screwed up big time here, no one should be buying the E/Travel Lite.

 

Wow! So it isn't even a D-series?

Can you get some detailed photos of it possibly?

Greg