E4310 Owner's Lounge

Not sure if you were responding back to my post. Meant to ask if you set up the SATA operation as AHCI in the Bios before you reinstalled. It may have come set up in Raid mode for rapid recovery.

Assuming it is in AHCI mode, you can get snappier performance from going to device manager, disk drive, policies, and enabling the two caching options. You can also install the Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers/software that speeds up some drives, especially SSDs.

 

I read a thread about it but dismissed it as too technical and unnecessary.

According to this: Intel® Rapid Storage Technology — What is Intel® Rapid Recover Technology? IRRT doesn't sound that bad of an idea, especially considering the rate of failure HD has these days. (knocking on wood)

Vista Business allows the entire HD image backup, since Vista already does it, will IRRT bring additional advantage to it?

 

Try following this thread. It relates to Windows 7, but I expect the procedure for Vista is similar.

John

 

Bokeh, your temps seem very close to mine. I don't know about you, but to me, a CPU that's running close to the boiling point of water is unsettling. Even under normal usage the chip randomly spikes over 70C. I already installed BIOS A04 but it didn't do anything to alleviate the heat issue. How could it possibly?

Once my sliced up finger heals I'm going to open up the laptop and see if I can apply some Arctic Cooling MX-2 to the CPU...

 

Let me know how it goes. Not sure of what your running, but in normal use mine is staying just under 50. If I watch 720p videos via Flash 10.1 I am in the upper 60s.

Intel says these are safe until 105C, but I am with you on temps, 90C feels high even if its considered normal. My M6500 with the i7-920XMhas never seen 80C. Then again that machine has two much larger fans and is built for a completely different set of uses.

I am playing around with Throttlestop to see if I can limit the CPU tdp.

Do you notice your chassis getting warm?

 

I am looking to get rid of my older M1210 Dell for a I5 540 E4310. I am looking at 4 gigs of ram (not sure if 1066 vs 1333 makes a difference here). I am getting a 3 year complete care warranty to make sure this works OK for me too.

The one I am looking at is in the outlet. Just curious if I will see a decent performance boost. I am using it for email & web. Light weight is important to me too.

EDIT: after reading the whole thread, it sounds like I get a resolution decrease 12**x800 to 1366x768. Not sure how much of a problem that will be. I would have liked a HDMI port but I dont really need it.

My main usage is for an everyday laptop for word, excel, web, etc. I have a 60gig vertex ocz SSD that I will put into the system.

My current M1210 with 2.0ghz C2D boots into windows 7's desktop in about 15-20 seconds. I am expecting the I5 540M to do better.

I dont get why the outlet E4310's dont have a webcam (its not a deal breaker but it would be nice).

Thanks,
Rich

 

If you're moving from 1280x800 to 1366x768, you probably won't notice a big difference in screen real estate. In fact, you might even enjoy having the extra horizontal pixels.

As for performance, there won't be a huge difference between a 2.0GHz C2D and a 2.53GHz Core i5 if all you're doing is MS Office and web surfing. You may notice improved multitasking performance, but probably nothing drastic. A nice SSD (like your Vertex) will have a larger impact on speed. Note that if you need more than 60GB of storage, you can easily remove the optical drive in the E4310 and replace it with this caddy, allowing you to install another 2.5" HDD or SSD. Graphics performance should also have a minor boost over the Go 7400.

The weight (with 6-cell battery) will be almost identical to that of your M1210, assuming you're using the standard 6-cell battery. You will also get better battery life with the E4310 + 6-cell. I get 5-6 hours when surfing the web with medium screen brightness.

Hope this helps.

 

I've decided to not bother applying the MX-2 to the CPU since the process of taking the machine apart seems painfully long. Also, after looking at pictures of the heatsink, I feel that better thermal paste simply won't do enough to warrant the effort. The heatsink is incredibly small. It's just a poor thermal design by Dell, in my opinion. It's definitely not unusable, and the chassis doesn't get very warm to the touch, but the temps still bother me.

I'm also using Throttlestop to limit the CPU to 1.2GHz when on battery. I'll report back with results later.

 

So asking what might be a dumb question. It sounds like the performance difference between my M1210 (2gb, C2D, SSD) vs a E4310 (2.5 I5, 4gb ram, ssd), wont be to noticeable.

Is it worth upgrading from one to the other?

I was hoping for something lighter.


One other question, some outlet systems have 4gb of 1066 vs 4 gb of 1333 in terms of ram. Will I see any difference in real world performance?

BTW, I am using Google Chrome, Outlook 2010, Excel, Word 99% of the time. I do browse youtube but I dont game at all. I am planning on picking up Starcarft 2 for my desktop (i7 high end system) but gaming on the laptop has never been easy with a touchpad.


Is it worth the upgrade at all? It sounds like its the same speed, same weight, is there a benefit?

 

It's not worth upgrade...

do a clean re-install on your m1210. the hardware is more than sufficient for the tasks that you listed...