E6320

Thanks for your post! Mine still didn't arrived.
The click buttons are ment to be used with the blue lenovo-style mouse stick between B, G and H.
I totally agree on that orange accessoir, I've read they are trying to seperate from lenovo and others with that 'highlight'.
Hope to read more. What about the battery life. Is the screen bright enough to work outside?

 

can anyone post a decent sized picture of the underside with the cover taken off? I want to know if the E6320 supports the mSATA drives that are being picked up by the major carriers.

thanks a lot if you can post one up!

 

Ahhh that makes sense about the buttons. Should have figured that one out, but I never use the stick.

The screen was fine in some limited outdoor use. This is a biggy for me since I work from home and live in the mountains. While it isn't as bright as that older 4300, the anti-glare does its job. I plan on testing it in brighter conditions this week... weather permitting.

No word yet on battery life, haven't had an occasion to run it down - or time to do it for the sake of testing.

Turns out my bosses favorite color is orange. I shouldn't have showed her this.

 

I just got my E6320. One thing I've noticed is when I hit F12 for the one time boot option, no USB device is listed - only the HDD, Nic and cd/dvd. All BIOS option seem to be appropriately checked.

Do any of you see this issue?

Thanks,
Harvey

 

Nevermind. You have to have a bootable USB device attached at the time you hit F12. The USB option then shows up.

Harvey

 

O.K, I've had my E6320 now for a week or so and thought I would post my first impressions. First, this is a "loaded" machine. I was originally going to get a desktop (Dell Optiplex or Precision) and a small laptop, but the less than stellar SB offerings for the desktops made me rethink. So I decided to get a "desktop replacement" in a small enough package so that I could use it for both work (while docked) and travel.

The pertinent specs on the E6320 are:

i7 cpu
256GB SSD
8GB Ram
6-cell battery (it does protrude from the back)
Windows 7 Professional

Build quality is quite good. It appears to be a very solid machine with a good keyboard (i.e, no flexing). I find the screen to be quite acceptable for my needs, with the laptop small enough to put into a sleeve and easily carried about when going on vacations, etc.

Upon first turning the computer on, the laptop went thru a one time hardware check (I've never seen this before). After completion, the normal win 7 setup began. Typical boot times into windows is about 45 seconds. Applications open up in the order of about 1/2 second ( i.e, it opens up IE explorerer or SeaMonkey roughly 10 time faster than my old Precision M4300).

Battery life seems to be good. I've only done a partial test, but after using the machine for surfing, word processing etc. for 3 hours, the battery meter still showed over 5 hours left. FWIW, I changed the default power scheme from the Dell version to the windows Balanced. This was done because the Dell scheme would not allow my flat panel monitor to go into a blank screen saver mode while docked - the Balanced scheme works properly.

In summary, so far, this appears to be a solidly built machine and is quite fast given the i7 processor and 256GB SSD. Hopefully, it will stay that way!

Harvey

 

Thanks for your report again. I hope your eSata/ext. drive issues are not a problem of a controller or something inside the e6320.

This review right here is new to me and looks promising: Dell Latitude E6320 Review | Dell Latitude & Laptop Reviews | Business Notebooks

My e6320 still didn't showed up...

 

I have now tried another WD eSata external drive and I still get the intermittent problem. Since the second drive shows the same issue - I don't think it's the drive or eSata cable (new cable with new drive).

I would also think that if it were a hardware problem with e6230, the imaging speed would always be bad - but even after it fails a subsequent try will give correct speeds. Similarly, I would think a flaky win 7 setup would also be consistently bad. I am stumped. Any ideas would be welcome.

A couple of questions:

1. Is there a way to do a factory restore directly from the Recovery Partition - if so, how? I did make the requested backup CD's, how do I use these - there is no manual for the e6320 (I guess I can call Dell tomorrow).

2. Are there any Intel drivers that I should be using for eSata operation?

Thanks,
Harvey

 

Well, this gets stranger and stranger. The last 4 or 5 times I've tried to image, I get bad speed of about 60Mbs (bits/sec). However, when I immediately try a large folder transfer (about 11.3 GB) I get transfer speeds of about 80 MBs (bytes/sec) which is about the correct speed. If I then subsequently try to image - the speeds are terrible.

The intermittent bad imaging speeds happen with both Paragon, Macrium Reflect and windows Backup. Any ideas?????

Thanks,
Harvey

 

Just wanted to follow up on this since I feel I'm nearing a resolution of this issue. I was away last week and needed the time since last Saturday to feel somewhat confident that I've identified the problem (I hope!!!).

Since I really didn't want to re-install win 7, I decided to purchase another brand of eSata External HDD (I previously had tried 2 WD drives which consistently exhibited the problem). I purchased an eSata G-Drive (primarily used by Macs) and reformatted it to NTFS. I have done numerous images since Saturday and have not encountered any issues using both Macrium Reflect and a functional demo version of Shadowprotect.

Furthermore, upon visiting the WD forum, I found a large thread critical of the particular WD drive I was using (primarily made as a DVR expander). Several posts indicated potential issues with the supplied eSata cable as well as the drive (intermittent stuttering when recording). The issue was bad enough that many posters were advocating for a recall of the product.

So it appears, at this time, that the issue was related to the WD drives (design flaw) and not the E6320 or the software.


Thanks,
Harvey