Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Oh sorry, I thought he applied his own images (form a clean install of XP that was done), and not using the XP provided with the laptop.

 

I think you are right. I wasn't disagreeing with you. I was pointing out for his benefit that if he built an image around the Dell facotry XP image then it would work better.

John

 

Woohoo i think i got a good one. I ran furturemark06 3x in a row and never had cpu over 60 nor gpu over 85c.

Running windows 7100 32bit

Afew things i noticed.
1. nvidias 186.03 for 32bit windows7 is corrupt on their server. Ive tryed 2 copies of the 32bit, and used 2 computers, nether would unpack. So i just installed the 186.03 for vista
2. before I installed the intel matrix drivers, the fan would run in low mode the entire time it was in windows. Now its never on unless im doing something intensive.
3. The bluetooth driver install is the worst ever. Took 3 attempts to get it to install, and it takes 2x longer then installing the nvidia drivers.
4. This is the worst screen ive had in years when it comes to blacks and viewing angles. While color is fine (no tinting nor yellowing) you have a 10degree arc to not have your blacks wash out. I guess this is the problem with the non shinny screens. Both have there pros and cons. God forbid some one put a mva panel in a notebook. Its not like notebook uses have multiple viewing angles that would be able to take advantage of the tech....

 

Cool!

Sadly, that is the down side of a matte/anti-reflective screen on laptop's.
See on desktop, there are more room to make the LCD good and be able to compensate for this drawback. But on a laptop, which is a fraction of a desktop LCD thickness, not so much. That is why it's hard to find laptops with such display and on store shelves glossy or even mirror like screens are put, so that you have the best vividness and view angle out of a TN LCD panel.

The real fix for the matte screen, is to go with a ISP LCD panel, as ISP panels have almost no view angle problem, 8-bit displays (instead of beeing 6-bit), real vivid colors, no backlight bleeding... but... it's not great in fast paste gaming, or very fast moving videos, and I THINK that it uses more power then a TN panel and to top things over it's VERY expensive.

 

I have 13 E6500s (XP SP3) that have the optical drive disappear, even during use. We constantly get event id's 9 and 12. Dell is saying they have never seen this before (maybe they should monitor this website)?! We have applied KB314060 and the drive continues to disappear. A reboot resolves the problem until the next random ID 9 and 12. We suspect the problem may be caused by an MS upgrade, but have not been able to identify the culprit. The issue appears to be related to the removable drive, as we had 38 Ultra small form factor (USFF) Optiplex 760's with a removable optical drive that had the same exact problem. Dell replaced the 760's with a Small Form Factor 760, which has a fixed optical drive, and the problem went away.

 

(i) Are you using the latest version of Intel's matrix storage manager. If not, install it. The optical drive is SATA and that software manages the SATA devices.

(ii) Have you enabled the extended battery life option in Dell ControlPoint power management? That includes an option for disabling the optical drive to save power.

John

 

My PE dvd problems could be related to this. Since it was working fine with previous E6400 we ordered, maybe the optical drive is driving crazy and pops BSODs while trying to load the PE environment. I have a couple of "backup" optical drives from a previous order when we got both DVD-R and DVD-RW for a particular setup (we usually don't provide RW to our employees here) I'll try booting a freshly-arrived one with that "old" optical drive to see if it's related.

That's an other good point. I've seen that IRRT operation mode, and I think it's activated. I'll try switching to AHCI for the DVD image installation process, since it works great when it's finally installed (as I said earlier, I still can make it install but it takes about 6 reboots of the PE dvd to load)

I'm on vacation right now so I'll try it tomorrow and give you all some feedback, incase someone runs into that problem to

Thanks a lot everyone!

 

Does anybody know whether it's possible to boot from a USB stick/flash card with a e6400? The start-up sequence doesn't recognize my USB stick it appears.

I replaced my DVD drive with a 2nd hard drive but now i'm not sure how where to put my rescue media on. In Belgium the external media bay drive can't be purchased from Dell. Not sure why that is.

Thanks

 

1. It is possible that there's something in the BIOS to allow booting from USB. Take a look.

2. Alternatively, get one of these so you can connect the optical drive to the eSATA port (there's more relevant material in that thread).

John

 

yep it boots off usb just fine.