Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

E6500 has all three card slots, E6400 has only two (Smart Card + Express Card OR PC Card).

 

SmartCard is a card reader that uses an RFID chip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_card | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID). This system is similar to a normal card reader like your debit/credit card. However instead of swiping it, you place it over a device. The card is not battery powered, it gets it's power wirelessly from the device reader (a bit like your electric toothbrush recharge base, there is no metal to metal contact to recharge the battery of the toothbrush). Once it powered the card up, the card sends a value back to the device. The Latitude E6400 comes with it, there is no options to not have it at Dell Canada. This system is used in some businesses instead of having the employees to learn a password to access a file/folder/drive/device, which will probably will write down on paper and lose it after.

Here is an example of an Express Card device:


Here is the same product (more or less), in PC card:


And here is the same product (more or less), in USB:


So in conclusion, you can see that pretty much all formats gets released by a company... so it's pretty much not the end of the world it's all the same.

 

My M4400 has a smartcard reader in it, you can set it up to read credit cards? Thats pretty cool! What else does it do?

 

Such a smartcard reader can read those small golden chips, nothing else. This means a "no" for credit cards because the relevant information is stored on the magnetic strips...

 

Some credit cards in the U.S have an RFID chip inside. Because it's cool and hip to not swipe your card. Which is super ultra stupid as anyone with a bag can have a more powerful device walk on the street and collect everyone credit cards. But anyway...

 

Wow, didn't know about that - maybe there is less scepticism about RFID in the US than over here. The only RFID chip I have is in my student's ID card, which doesn't make that much difference except for being contactless. When paying at the university's cafeteria, for example, I can simply put my purse on the reader. Talking about the range - it doesn't even work on the wrong side of the coins, so I don't think the bag method would work.

But it seems like we're talking about two kinds of smartcard reader, and while the E6400 offers both, I picked the wrong one. Besides the contactless smartcard reader (under the right palm rest) which is RFID based, there is also a reader for "traditional" smartcards on the left side.

 

Has anyone worked out how to configure the SmartCard reader to work for log-in to Windows XP rather than pre-boot?

I am not sure which RFID smartcards are compatible and when I was trying to register my work-card for pre-boot authentication, it wouldn't work.

Otherwise happy with the e6400 so far.
My only problems are:
1. Build quality - right speaker grill is loose and needs replacing
2. Clicking HDD
3. Poor quality speakers and sound in XP requiring the PC Spk mute in previous posts.

 

Hmm, you know what is interesting, I just asked everyone that has a Seagates (laptop/desktop), and they all say that is clicks. There is a post on this forum fairly new that has a patch that fixes the problem. I also know how to do it from the OS (option in the controller), but this is under Vista.

 

So,
I bought this computer and start playing around with it. Now for some reason I have some bugs. During startup there ia an error and sometimes the system hangs during sleep. Also I'm unable to do a disc cleanup.

So I thought to use the recover partition. You know what? The dell and tools subdir are empty. No factory.wim etc.

Is this normal?

 

What happens if you press F8 a few times while the Dell logo is showing during boot-up?

The user manual (page 57) says this should get you into the factory image restore, at least for Vista. There's no clue as to what happens if you are running XP.

John