Vostro 3400 - who else?

Hi

Is anyone experiencing this excessive fan noise issue (which may be due to a CPU heat problem) affecting some Vostro 3500, 3400 and 3300 machines?

Vostro 3500 Fan Noise - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

Want to see how prevalent this problem is before buying a Vostro 3400.

Thanks.

 

I swear my fan has been on the whole time and i just got it 2 days ago, however its not particularly loud im running on "power saver" and integrated graphics, though when i do swap over to "high power" and discrete graphics the fan does pickup a bit

 

Sunclear - head over to insanelymac. Under Snow Leopard Installation you'll find a thread on the Vostro 3xxx series.
You'll need the Nvidia GPU to have a satisfying experience at full resolution. If you have that, then it is quite feasible to just put a new HD into the Vostro, install OSX on it (using a custom bootcd and the retail OSX DVD disk and swap the HD back out to a USB caddy.
That way you can put your Windows 7 disk back in the Vostro and run OSX from USB if you want.
You'll no doubt have some interesting times and it is apparent that for the more recent vostros where you have a choice between integrated and discrete GPUs there are for the moment issues in getting OSX to work properly on Nvidia. This may be overcome soon. Older Vostros (like my 3500 with Nvidia) have very few problems with OSX.

 

How do you over come the problems with the discrete and integrated GPUs? been trying to run liveCDs no luck =[

 

Hi

It seems that a Vostro 3300/3400/3500 can use either Intel's Rapid Storage Technology driver or Windows 7's driver for SATA and eSATA.

Drivers and Downloads

In your experience, which performs better, esp. as regards eSATA (esp. hot-plugging)? Or perhaps there's little practical difference?

AHCI will be selected in the BIOS.

Thanks!

 

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHHHH! this is driving me mad! please help me! ok, heres the story

I brought a vostro 3400 as a dell second, it had a dead hard drive which I have replaced, reinstall windows and updated to bios a9.

According to the service tag, BPWB5N1 and the bios it has the nvidia 310 card and i5 cpu, however when I installed the nvidia driver it only installed the audio driver. I used the windows update to get the standard vga driver which installed a intel HD graphics card. So at this point I'm really confused. There is still a standard vga device in the device manager so I'm assuming that it has both the nvidia and intel cards and switches to the nvidia when more power is required. but I cant install the **** nvidia driver.

so check out the pictures and let me know what you think, thanks!

 

ok, heres a pic I took of the bios, weird eh?

 

aalaptop try the following:

1. First Install the Intel Driver then reboot the system twice.

2. Go to Power Manager of Windows and make sure it is set to HIGH PERFORMANCE.

3. Restart the system and go to BIOS system set up and click on ADVANCED tab and select SYSTEM CONFIGURATION and make sure the HYBRID GRAPHIC card is set to HYBRID then save and restart.

4. Then install the NVIDIA driver and reboot the system twice.

Regards

 

thinking of purchasing one and i noticed this topic is a bit old from march/april and i am wondering if dell made any modifications to this model to improve anything to make it better?

 

thanks for the help. I've figured it out, I was using the dvd which came with the laptop. I downloaded the latest driver from the dell site which fixed the problem, I'm not sure why the dvd wouldnt work.

Also, my backlit keyboard on my 1340 turns itself off after a few minutes but it doesnt on the 3400, does anyone know howto fix this? thanks!