Latitude E6510 Owner's Lounge

Joining in the Lounge with the very reasonably priced E6510 from Dell Outlet - <drumroll>

Me.

Here's the config, from what I understood by the weird Dell Descriptions at least

 

I will share the process I just did/went through and perhaps it will help....

To me it was 'the way to go' and going by what you 'said' (highlighted in bold) I think you will agree

I just received my E6510 a couple days ago from the outlet also. The one I ordered came with a 160gig 5400rpm and that's ok cause the other specs is what i was paying for and I just so happen to have a seagate momentus 500gig 7200rpm waiting....hehe.

FIRST thing I did was switch out the hard drives. Did not power it up even. That way there is no chance for the BIOS to gather info on the prepacked dell win 7 install on the 160 hdd. Also saves hours from installing the aforementioned and 'cleaning it up', not to mention once you have one OS running on a hdd in a machine and just switch hdd's with another OS the BIOS doesn't like it very much and translates that hiccup to your windows os also. Minimal hiccup but I like to have none if possible.

Anywhoo, with my 'other' 500gig hdd slapped in, i powered her up and went straight to the BIOS. Poked around to see what info and 'gear' was there, turned off stuff i didnt want and switched from IRRT to AHCI. As John mentioned it has 'kinks' in it and is a new technology from intel having to do with raid and other nuances that arent all that important or the way to go. AHCI worked perfectly and is very fast, and i get a esata hdd boot option when needed haha.

I threw in the win 7 pro disc that dell provided (or you can use a retail or whatever if you got one) and did a fresh/clean install.
I had already downloaded all the drivers from the dell support site and had them on my flash drive. I then moved them over to the desktop.
After researching my booty off on what drivers were necessary, buggy, progs necessary and not, etc. etc. I came up with a short list and installed the following.....and installed them in the order that dell recommends which has always worked for me in the past flawlessly....

*Dell System Software

*Intel Chipset

*Intel Turbo Boost Driver

*Intel Q57 HD Graphics Driver

*Intel Gigabit NIC Ethenet Driver

*IDT HD Audio Driver

*Dell Wireless Driver

*Ricoh SD MMC Driver

thats it !

Everything works on my lappy and with no bloatware or crappy shiat that slows it down or conflicts / crashes. Namely dell control point software etc.

Notes -

-practically all, if not all, 'function' keys and settings work without any of the control point software, and i have the backlit keyboard !! works fine

-i do not use or plan to use the pc card slot, smartcard, or expresscard slots but if i do down the road the drivers are waiting for me in a folder if they are even needed

-everything else works perfectly and fast, wireless, esata, usb's, video, audio, keyboard, lights, function keys, sd card slot, firewire, dvd rw drive, volume buttons, mute button, etc. etc.

-the intel gfx driver, latest version on dell, i noticed on install was a package that also came with turbo boost driver and an audio driver, BUT...
i still installed the IDT HD audio driver and IT DID make a difference and is necessary or at least very important/and something you will want versus not have. You may be able to skip the turbo boost driver in the above order and be fine with the one in the Q57 gfx driver package, not sure though, but pretty sure lol. Just don't let the IDT hd audio driver go thinking the one that came in the gfx package is good enough. If my guess is right...the audio driver in the gfx package is for the hdmi digital out thingy, and the IDT audio driver is the main shazzam for all things 'audio', speakers, headphones, etc.

-i use an external mouse 100% so i didnt bother with the touchpad drivers, you might be different, i heard these drivers are much better nowadays. And the touchpad works fine in a basic way without those drivers also, notice i said 'basic'

-i dont care about the free fall sensor so didnt install that driver, don't care for the NIC card diagnostics, dell diagnostics, anything 'control point', backup, reader, raid etc. Stuff i dont want, wont use, and am fine without.

Squeaky clean and minimal is what I like, and bug/crash free is always nice.

Hope that helps and best of luck on your 'new' mean machine.

I am very happy with my 6510

 

parodielin

and if you wanted to 'swap' hdd's using the factory install 'image' on the original 160gig, VeryOldGuy left you some very good info/comments to help

 

The Dell ControlPoint System Manager software is not a resource hog. I think it is advantageous to install it for the additional functionality that it brings (including, I think, the Dell tweaks to the Windows 7 power profiles).

John

 

GoodBytes and VeryOldGuy,

Thanks for the comments.

Backup's GUI interface fails with essentially the error message as does wbadmin:

Presumably it's complaining about the RECOVERY partition. I wonder what Dell did to mess it up? I'm reluctant to force a conversion to NTFS format.
(It did manage to backup the user areas to zip files before giving up.)

I used to use an ancient version of Ghost to backup my previous computer, but it booted from floppy and didn't recognize USB disks. I'll investigate getting a newer version of ghost and an ESATA adaptor. (My external disks are all internal SATA plugged into a USB dock.)

 

Seems more likely wbadmin is complaining about the READER (D: ) partition, which is not ntfs.

 

>>FIRST thing I did was switch out the hard drives. Did not power it up even. That way there is no chance for the BIOS to gather info on the prepacked dell win 7 install on the 160 hdd. Also saves hours from installing the aforementioned and 'cleaning it up', not to mention once you have one OS running on a hdd in a machine and just switch hdd's with another OS the BIOS doesn't like it very much and translates that hiccup to your windows os also. Minimal hiccup but I like to have none if possible.

I don't think there is any problem with booting the OEM drive to review your factory installed system in Windows before swappping in a new drive and performing a clean install of Windows. The BIOS doesn't care that a previous system drive has been removed... there are no residual carry-over mysterious hiccups from swapping in a new drive other than it will not boot until you install an OS on it.

>>I had already downloaded all the drivers from the dell support site and had them on my flash drive. I then moved them over to the desktop.
After researching my booty off on what drivers were necessary, buggy, progs necessary and not, etc. etc. I came up with a short list and installed the following.

Booting your new system before removing the factory OEM drive allows you to research the installed name and driver of the primary devices in Device Manager that you will be downloading drivers for from Dell.com. Then you'll be prepared to achieve same or similar installation on the replacement drive.

GK

 

I agree.

GK

 

I think you're right. I'm not a "road warrior" and don't really need the GO functionality, so I just now converted it to NTFS. I've started backup again and it's moving right along. I think my previous backup of C: took about a half-hour, so it'll be a while be...
crud

Indeed that directory doesn't exist. strange. I've now created a shortcut Music pointing to My Music.
Trying again...

yay!
"Creating a system image of OS (C"
[*grump* why can't all windows be "copied and pasted"???]
crud again.
Same error:can't find Music???
deleted shortcut, created plain text file with that name.

(there are 3 vhd virtual disk images -- 150MB, 250MB and 36.7GB -- in the backup folder, so something worked.)
try again.
"Back up now"

Saw image of READER and RECOVERY flicker by. OS now again...
system image of C successful! Finished !

now to try reinstalling the video drivers with cleanup.

*sigh*

 

A backup is not a successful backup until it is restored. My problem with proprietary and image backups is that you must restore them successfully before you can confirm that they are good backups and recover your personal data files. For my personal use, I prefer regular automated (and fast) backup of important user files only in their native format. IF a system ever fails, repair the hardware, re-install the OS with the latest greatest stuff, and copy my files over from the backup store. In practice, 99.99% usage of my backup is for day-to-day recovery of one-off files (user undo), and for routine system maintenance or upgrades.

GK