E6410 Owner's Thread

I installed 64-bit on my E6410 from a Dell recovery CD that came with my Dell desktop and it activated out of the box. It works fine, though for some reason the laptop freezes upon coming out of hibernate now.

 

The Windows 7 activation key can be used for either the 64-bit version or 32-bit version unlike keys for previous versions of Windows, so you should have no problem in using the key from your CoA to activate a 64-bit version of Windows 7. I have done something similar to this (using a 32-bit upgrade key to activate a 64-bit version of Windows 7) and it worked.

 

volume on screen display.

*fixed* just had to reinstall system/device manager for it to show up again

 

beginning to hate the sluggish bios of this system....way too slow.

 

maybe an SSD upgrade could cut some seconds off of boot-ups?

 

boot up is fine...its the bios initialization of the e6410 that's the prob. way slow compared to other models. ssd wont help bios

 

True, the E6410's BIOS is slower, but pre-boot authentication is faster than the E6400, so I don't notice much difference. It is a little worrysome when nothing shows up on the LCD for a couple seconds though.

 

I recently got an E6410 at work which has been having a lot of stability issues. I tried a few different Nvidia driver versions which varied the random crashes but didn't solve anything.

I did some MemTest 86+ testing and this laptop ran fine for 2 or 3 hours without crashing but was still randomly freezing up. This test runs before Windows boots up and loads drivers so this eliminated Windows and Nvidia driver version as the cause of the problem.

While the test was running, MemTest 86+ was error free so that had me thinking that the CPU and memory are probably OK. If the memory or CPU were bad, this test will usually show an error or pages of errors at different memory locations before it crashes. During this test the GPU is likely running its default 3D clocks since there is no software running to control the GPU. The amount of heat coming out the side of the E6410 and the fan speed also had me thinking this.

For my next test I booted up into Windows and ran MSI Afterburner. Most enthusiasts use this program to overclock their GPUs but I decided to do the opposite and do some underclocking. I dragged the sliders as far to the left as they could go. This cut in half the maximum GPU 3D core, shader and GPU memory speed while still maintaining the normal 3D voltage of 1.00.



So far so good. I made it through a full 8 hour shift without a single lock up, no black screens or white screens or Nvidia driver crashes and recovered or any other problems. Obviously testing is just in the early stages but if anyone else is having stability issues with their E6410 then this is worth a try.

I don't use this laptop for gaming so 100% stability is way more important than 3D GPU performance. If 50% GPU speed turns out OK then I might test it for a few days at 75% of its normal 3D speed and I also might test various driver versions again. So far it seems like a failing GPU issue or a GPU that can no longer run reliably at its rated speed. Just like a CPU, if you slow them down they can run reliably again.

 

windows experience index on memory is kinda low

i got 5.9 on 4gb ddr3 1066 speed rams. isn't that kinda low? and it only shows 3.82 gb usable on my 64bit win 7 pro.

 

no...same ram..same score for me