Dell Latitude 6430u - finally a manufacturer that gets the business ultrabook!

On a business trip with 6430u. This thing rocks. Small and light enough for travel, but powerful enough for getting real work done during breaks in action. I've discovered two minor issues thus far. My trackpoint stick will not move left, only up/down/right, thus I have to use trackpad. The trackpoint stick is more convenient when crammed in coach on plane and guy in front leans his chair back. Also, for most of today, the Fn brightness controls did not work. Nor did the display control panel brightness settings work. My screen was at 100% all the time, which seriously drains the battery, and was way too bright in the dark. But for some strange reason, it now seems to work, even though I did not reboot. I'll keep an eye on it.

 

If it happens also when booting with a live linux distro I'd call dell to have it fixed.

 

I just got this laptop with the same screen, and yes, the anti-glare coating is too aggressive. It is known that this kind of coating will cause a "sparkle" effect, but it is very pronounced on this screen. They really need to tone it down. It's already matte so you don't get the ridiculous reflections like you would on a glossy screen, so to me it's too much.

 

Anyone have a solution to fan control? I performed a clean install and I'm pretty sure I got all the drivers, but the fan seems to be either on or off. It's wonderfully silent when off, but that doesn't last long when I start using it, and then the fan is on and a bit annoying. I'd love to have it always set to some middle ground to keep the temp and noise steady instead of oscillating between silent and noisy. I've tried speedfan and it doesn't seem to be able to control in gradients either.

 

I fear that you're experiencing the middle ground right now... try a game with the audio off and then you'll easily find out it it's the case.
Akaneiro doesn't require an installation and is driving mi fan crazy.

 

Just ran prime95 for a bit and saw temps hit 83C. Fan definitely went higher than what I'm normally experiencing, but the noise wasn't significantly worse. The core seemed to get throttled down to 2.6GHz as well at that temp. I have the i7-3667U cpu.

 

Prime95 likely will let the GPU to run at low frequency thus making the overall heat output of the i7 lower than a game.
BTW I do understand that gaming may never be in the list of uses of the system thus making this an irrelevant test for you.
I can recognize 4 level of fan activity (including no spinning) in my i7 system.

 

How does the keyboard on this compare to the Latitude E6400/E6410 and the XPS14, which I own.

Thinking of changing the XPS for this as the keyboard does my head in. Little tactile feedback and the keys are too far apart. And I HATE buttonless touchpads.

 

The keyboard is not one I'd dream about, but it's fair.
BTW IBM model M is my kind of dream keyboard so getting me happy with a notebook's one is very hard.

 

LOL my dream keyboard was that on my old E6400 so anything on a par with that will suffice. Anyone able to offer a direct comparison?