D630 Owners Thread

Ok ive had the D630 for ~2 months now. I was looking at the keyboard, the Fn + Right Arrow key has a picture of a small light over a keyboard

I know that is an extremely horrible picture but, hopefully you get the point. Anyway my question is, what is the purpose of this fn key? and does it work?

 

It turns the ambient light sensor on or off. Only has effect when running on battery. The ambient light sensor dims or brightens the display depending on lighting current lighting conditions.

dordale

 

Actually, it's the keyboard light. Similar to the ThinkLight on Thinkpads, it's a small lamp that illuminates the keyboard in dark lighting conditions. Unfortunately, the light doesn't actually exist on the D630 (or the D830, which I have) so the key's secondary function is useless. It's a stock key from their parts line, and the feature is only to be found on the ATG series of notebooks.

 

I got a D630 with the hybrid hard drive, 9 cell battery, and nvidia graphics card. The Windows Vista Index score for the hard drive is: 4.8. Which is the same score a non hybrid 5400rpm hard drive gets.
With Windows Hard Drive Power Saving Mode enabled, I get about 4 to 4.5 hours of battery life. With Windows Hard Drive Power Saving Mode disabled, I get an extra 20 to 30 minutes.

I'm not sure if anyone else is having this issue, but with the hybrid hard drive, I'm faced with intermittent "freezes" when I'm downloading off the Internet. Usually anywhere between 30 seconds to 2 minutes. The problem goes away when I hear the hard drive spin up.

 

Thanks mate! I have another question but i knew it was something like that my friend has a thinkpad and was hoping my latitude had the same feature i guess we didnt luck out =/.

Anyway my other question is, during normal process or just when its just sitting idle, My computer seems to give out a clicking sound, I am assuming this is from the HD is this a problem I should notify Dell about as I am still under warranty?

 

If it's the HD, definitely contact Dell now. Clicking hard drives + a few days = dead hard drives. Backup all your important data too.

It could just be the CD drive, though, or something else. So it might is worth listening around and pulling out the CD drive to see if it still clicks. After you backup up your data, though

In other news, apparently my screen wasn't actually dead, the plug on the motherboard had just come partly lose. I fixed that and now it works perfectly.

 

If the clicking is coming from the side of the HDD, then it's most likely that. As you'll see in a lot of threads here, the problem is, sadly, not uncommon. Call Dell up and ask them if they can send you a replacement. A lot of people have been able to get that done. And yes, the warranty will still cover that.

 

Why do people offer their opinion with no basis in fact?

I received a new T60 w/3GB ram and T7100, running Vista Basic. IMHO, Vista is absolute bloat compared to XP.

On my old Inspiron 700m with 1.5 GB and 1.6 Pentium M, boot time = sub 30 seconds (from button push to cursor usability). Shut down time = 15 seconds (from button push to power off).

It is absolutely unacceptable to have an operating system run slower despite much faster hardware.

It is absolutely necessary to shut off the index searching and prefetching on Vista if you don't want to rip your hair off.

Again IMO for most users sticking with XP is best.

 

Mercer240, first off, a clean install of Vista makes a huge difference in boot time and general reduction of bloat. Thinkpads come with all of the wonderful bundled software that I, personally, have no need for, and if I owned a Thinkpad I would promptly reformat it and do a clean install. I did that for my D630, but that was also because I put Vista Business on it instead of the included Vista Basic. Regardless, I have never been satisfied with an OS installed by the manufacturer. I'm sure there are some that are great, but I haven't experienced them.

Second, I'm actually rather a fan of indexing and prefetching. Indexing isn't as customizable as it should be as far as when it is ok to index, but I haven't had a problem with it. Prefetching, on the other hand, is wonderful. Were I at my laptop I would time the boot, but it is solidly under a minute to a usable desktop (open firefox and google), and programs open up like lightning because they've already been loaded to RAM instead of having to load them from the HDD. Sure, it takes up RAM, but when another program needs that memory, Vista relinquishes it without any issues that I've run into yet. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

I also have XP Pro on this laptop. Yes, it boots faster, yes, it uses less RAM, and yes, it will play my games faster once I get them installed. However, I never feel bogged down by Vista for the things I do with it 99% of the time, and I enjoy the GUI changes as well as the prefetching and indexing. As always, your mileage may vary, but Vista is not the dog of an OS that many claim it to be.

 

Mercer...not sure what about my original post set you off...admittedly, I don't have any experience running Vista on my laptop as I ordered it with XP and have no desire to upgrade. I've also read numerous posts (including posts in this thread) from people who are perfectly satisfied running Vista on their D630's. Opinions are just that...opinions--including your opinion that Vista is "absolute bloat". BTW, Do you have experience running Vista on a D630?

dordale