Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

Without commenting on resolution, I can only say that I'd ALWAYS choose an LED display over an LCD display. Very nice difference.

 

Just to clarify, the LED is only the backlight, as alternative to a fluorescent tube. The actual Liquid Crystal Display panel is the same technology for both backlight options.

I also agree the LED backlight is preferable. They are usually brighter and/or use less power.

John

 

Thank you for that clarification. The brightness is probably the best part of the situation.

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A new problem has come up on my computer. Now, occasionally, it gets stuck on the "blue bar" at boot-up time for about 10 minutes. Not all the time, just occasionally. If I have enough patience (go get coffee?) it eventually boots up.

 

I had even more interesting problem, when the laptop fell into the never ending reboot cycle, right after the bios boot-up. Disabling Trusted Platform Module (it was enabled) in the BIOS settings, solved this problem to me.

Edit: this was happening on E6500.

 

I just went into the BIOS after reading this message. The "activate / deactivate" radio buttons were grayed out. Is there some other place that I need to go to deactivate this?

Does the fingerprint reader rely on the TPM? (I'm guessing not, but ... can't hurt to ask.)

 

Hmm... That surprices me. My fast fan kicks in way sooner than yours then. I have just made a stress test of multiplier 6x and it kicked in a couple of times. My max CPU temp is 47C in the test and even so the fast fan kicked in several times. Weird that there is such a big difference, that your temp can stabalise around 65C when I don't get anything near it in this test and even so the fast fan kicks in

 

Hello all.

Someone here asked about the dreaded cpu whine.. Mine had it.
So I called Dell and the next day they sent a guy to replace the motherboard. Problem solved.

Now my problem is constantly blinking hard drive led. Happens 1-2 times / second. Also some noise coming from there at the same time but luckily not as annoying as the cpu whine was. I think that the hard drive is not writing anything. The sound of writing to the disk is different and much more quiet. I'm running XP and already tried to disable the virus protection software. No luck there :/.

Guess I'll have to ask them replace the hard drive too. It's just that I already spent a day installing all the software I'm going to need.

First impressions:
+ screen
+ excellent keyboard
- touchpad (somehow cumbersome)

 

I attach some evidence. The fan goes to first speed (~3000rpm according to I8KFanGUI) when THM_ exceeds 70C. This then drops the CPU temperature which stabilises. My core 0 is 9C cooler under load than core 1 (hence RMClock graphs for each core). The ambient temperature is around 22C, which might help. I'm now using BIOS A06. I'm sure that when I originally tested my E6400 the fan would go to fast speed after about 10 minutes of 60C+ operation. (HWmonitor plots using V1.11: 1.10 gives core temps 5C lower).

I'm getting a well-muffled regular tick from my HDD. I think there's too much going on in the background for the HDD to ever get much rest.

If you really want to know what is happening, try Sysinternals DiskMon.

John

 

Hi all,

I'm new here but I've been reading Notebookreview for a long time now. So I wanted to ask a question about the E6400.

I notice that a lot of people have been having problems with theirs and the feeling I get from reading about them is that the E6400 is an unfinished product. I've just ordered an E6400 and now I'm a bit worried if I made the right decision. I ordered it because I wanted to buy a reliable, durable, well performing and well supported notebook.

My question is very simple : based on your own experiences with the E6400, would you recommend that I continue with the order or cancel it and buy a Thinkpad T400?

 

Most of the issues we are seeing appear to be software related and Dell appear to be working on fixing the problems. I don't know if the T400 is better in this respect.

John