Windows 7 on Latitude E6400

when you say you can't seem to get it back do you mean that going back on A/C doesnt make it come back? Do you have dell control point installed and have it set for extended battery life?

 

I do have DCP installed, and i did play with the extended battery life a couple of days ago, I have since disabled the extended battery life and rebooted a couple of times since.

 

does aero reenable when you plug it back in? also, what happens if you select balanced or high performance rather than power saver? also, if it DOES reenable when plugged in, why on earth would you want AERO when it is on battery, it'll kill your batt life.

 

Yea I had that. That is because of DCP is lost. Uninstall DCP, and re-install it. Well there is a way to make it unlost, but you just have to play with Windows settings (refresh rate, 16/32-bit colors, enable manually Aero, etc..), and even kill DCP via Task Manager.

We have to wait for a real Win7 release.
I use the second release of DCP on my laptop (I use the vista one). It works fine under my laptop, and doesn't exit a full screen application/video/game nor steal focus, when you change the brightness, keyboard backlit, etc... and it lighter all together.

 

I have noticed a lack of performances lately, like my cpu load goes up to 70%/80% easily and it's always around 40% or so. is this normal. I have firefoz with nothing heavy, like 10 tabs with little to no flash, skype and msn open, and BT. that's it. I thought it was a virus at first but then I scanned everything in safe mode and found nothing. so odd.

 

Open the Task Manager and see what eats this. (Consider that 1-2% of your CPU usage is used by the Task Manager itself to refresh the data).

If you close all the mentioned software do you have this program? How about opening 1 application at a time and see what causes the problem. Also ensure that you don't have useless startup programs. It could also be Windows performing maintenance, or it can be your Anti-Virus.

What Anti-Virus are your using?

 

goodbytes, thianks for the advice but I already went through that. I have no anti-virus running. I am using RMclock, the CPU load is high and the OS load is low. also the cpu meter of the win 7 gadget is low. aero is off. I am running almost a bare bone setup. I killed "windows medial player network sharing service" which at times was spiking up, and what kind of useless thing is it anyway. but that didn't help much. is it normal for the cpu load to be so crazy all over the place?

 

Mine goes from 1% to 6%... which is mostly taken my the Task manager which requires the CPU to refresh all the information. But, it is not normal that it spikes all over the place at above 10% when everything is clsoe for such CPU in the Latitude E series (Intel Core 2 Duo).
Aero actually uses your CPU. if you want to reduce CPU usage you want it turned on as it uses the GPU instead.

Can you try to disable BT and Wireless via BIOS, and see if that helps. I wonder if its a driver conflict or device issue. Now I know you need these devices.. but it's just for debugging purposes so that we know what causes the problem and not to be considered a solution.

 

I am gonna try that. But I wanted to say that in task manager things are fine like you described. is it possible that perhaps RMclock is giving me wrong values?

 

Windows is an operating system. It's the one that makes your components in your system and your software work.. else they are just a bunch of devices with no purpose. Yes, an operating system is extremely complicated, in fact it's so complicated that it's basics are being covered in 2-3 university course. So because Windows does all the magic, I think it's more correct than some software that have limited access (compared to the OS) of your system status.