Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

The configuration on this picture is with 9 cell battery - it sticks out.
If you choose the default 6 cell battery - it won't stick out.

I have 9 cell battery and it sticking out doesn't bother me.

 

I would clarify that the 6 cell battery is flush with the hinges, which stick out slightly at the back. The 9 cell sticks out a further 2cm / 3/4" beyond the hinges.

John

 

Your hinges sticks outs? For me they are flat with the rest of the laptop... I think you got me confused.
Unless by "slightly" you mean fraction of nano-meters, because you somehow found a tool to measure this.
By touch it's flat, nothing sticks out, here.

 

You must have a different version of the E6400 if the hinges (more precisely the hinge covers) do not stick out relative to the back edge at the corners.

The attached photo shows a 6 cell battery in my E6400.

John

 

Guys! I got my SSD (OCZ Vertex 120 GB) but I am in a fix: I don't have any Windows disk on me. Currently, I am runningWindows XP Pro downgrade (done by Dell) .So, how do I install my new SSD? I mean, how would I load OS once I put in the new SSD? I don't see a 'restore partition' on my E6400.

 

Ah ok I get what you mean now.. yea I have the same thing.
I thought you talked about the metal hinge of the screen being themselves even more out.

 

Sorry but running XP with an SSD is the worst thing you can do with it.
XP was not even remotely designed to manage SSD storage device. And it's abysmal memory management may reduce the SSD life span significantly, as it uses more the hard drive (SSD in your case) rather than your RAM, no mater how much RAM you have. (ie: it always act if you are very low in memory). Remember that SSD's have a limited number of writes. The SSD has a complex system put in place to extend this limit by using different location when writing, for instance. But it's ultimately the OS that win's over. So if XP loves to read and write at the same location... then well... I don't want to see the results.

Vista supports and treat SSD very well. Win7 has additional optimization put in place to increase performance. Both OS, allows to extend the life span of SSD's and reduce power consumption allowing you to gain battery life.

What is the life span of an SSD? We don't know... but it is expect to last 10 years at best. 5 years for the first generation of SSD's, which you don't have.

Every Latitude E6400 should come with Vista disk. If you did not receive it, requires Vista disk. Because you choose to go with XP downgrade, you'll be stuck with Vista 32-bit, meaning you still don't unlock the full potential of your system, especially if you have 4GB of RAM. I don't know if Dell would be nice enough to send you Vista 64-bit for free... I'll doubt it.

When you have an SSD, you should never defrag it, as this will kill the drive, especially done monthly. It's totally unnecessary as you fragmentation is fine on a SSD as you don't have the mechanical arm that needs to seek other parts of the data.. everything is brought together directly. Same applies for formatting the drive. Vista and Win7 performs a quick format on drive when you install either of them as it doesn't actually delete any file (as that is considered as a write), but rather just removes the index.

How SSD's work:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=2

 

Is the SSD of bigger or smaller capacity than the HDD. If it is bigger then it is easy to clone your HDD onto the SSD. If the SSD is smaller then cloning may still be possible but you may need to make the partition size smaller than the SSD. Casper may be able to do this but Acronis True Image can't.

I would call this sub-optimal. It's not going to kill the SSD in a few days. I'm currently running XP on a SSD because I waiting until I'm 100% confident I can switch over to W7 without having any problems. I tried Vista for a year but it caused me too many headaches.

John

 

Thanks for the tips, GoodBytes.

I do need to use Windows XP because of some work-related security softwares only being available for Windows XP right now. They may or may not work on W7. I'd move to W7 in few months. But for now, I've to use XP and I am willing to take this temporary performance hit.

My HDD is 160GB. SSD is 120GB. But my HDD is only 60GB full. To run Casper or something, I'd need a bootable computer first. I only have one laptop (E6400) and if I install Casper, how do I clone stuff from it and transfer it to SSD ? Maybe I need to buy an eSATA cable? I can connect OCZ vertex with an eSATA cable and then clone stuff from my HDD to SSD?

Do you've phone number for calling Dell Pro Support or something? I remember buying Dell NBD Onsite warranty but I misplaced or (mistakenly threw with other junk) the box and all the paperwork that came with the laptop.

 

Running XP Pro on an Optiplex GX620 desktop + twin 256GB SSDs without any issues; they are more to my liking than the twin Raptors they replaced.

And Casper works great, it resizes the cloned size on the fly.