Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

How do you know that it is throttling itself? Is it slow?

 

It gets stuttery. RMClock shows the trottling (~333MHz). It is meant to be one of the advanced power saving options but I get it even when booting on mains power. It might be because I sometimes use the 65W PSU which Dell think doesn't have enough capacity to run my E6400 at full load (total nonsense).

BTW, thanks to gmoneyphatstyle for the link, E6400 review @ Trusted Reviews.

John

 

Hi! We just picked up 3 Dell E6400's for our office. They are "hanging" (or "freezing") several times per day. These are hard freezes where the mouse doesn't move. This started occuring out of the box before ANY 3rd party software was installed. ("Factory fresh" if you will.)

Dell support has been ineffective in trying to resolve this.

Has anyone else had this issue?

 

That's not a problem I recognise. Three computers has me wondering about the office environment. What happens if you leave a computer disconnected from the network? Will it keep going all day? I would suggest you uninstall the Dell Connection Manager (it is only needed for WWAN) and has caused a few problems.

I also suggest you start by installing BIOS A05 which appears to have fixed more bugs than Dell mentions in the notes.

Then I would suggest you use RMClock to check that the CPU is not throttled, although that should just hit performance, not cause a total lock-up.

John

 

We are consultants so we are in different locations. (Different regions of the country actually!) One of us has updated to A05, and he's having more lock-ups than the rest of us. We thought it might be related to USB, but I'm not so sure. One of us gets "squiggly" lines on the display during the lockup.

I'm not 100% certain that we are having the exact same problems, but it's too close. Obviously it's highly likely that the machines were from the same batch. (Same purchase order, same config, shipped the same day.)

 

I had it with my first E6400. I got a replacement for other reasons and haven't had this problem with my replacement. However, I think the reason why I don't have this problem with my replacement is because I immediately uninstall all the software that I did not need including almost all of the dell management softwares. So I suggest you go ahead and uninstall any software that you don't need and update those that you do need. Oh and I also used CCleaner and disk cleanup after I did all those things, that might have helped, I don't know.

 

Good information. It sounds like you are pretty convinced the issue is software related. I'm not even entirely sure what extras Dell installed. I'll have to take a look. Thanks for the feedback. Good to know that someone was able to resolve this.

 

If I run RM clock it says 1.2500V for 9x

 

Did you get the 5530 HSPA / WWAN card. Dell have just posted a new driver with this information:

Looks high. Can you go to the advanced CPU settings page, select mobile CPU and the restart RMClock and look again at the CPU info. My P8600 is 0.925V to 1.1375V. If your voltages are for the mobile CPU setting then the 6x (LFM) voltage is outside of the range in the specification (HFM 0.9 - 1.25V, LFM 0.85 - 1.025V). What is the lowest voltage offered on the RMClock profiles page?

John

 

I changed it to mobile (but besides from that have default settings, havent changed anything). Now it says minimal - 6.0x - 0.9250V and maximal - 9.0x - 1.2000V
So still quite higher than yours. How come the difference?