E6410 Owner's Thread

not only are the screens quiet bad on the e6x20's but i have read in another forum and herd from users that with the 6420 there is a problem with electro-static shock. i herd if you rub your feet on the ground and touch the system the screen just goes snow white and the onlyway to fix it is to have the lcd screen and assembly replaced

 

Back when I had my E6400 it would disconnect from my home wireless router from time to time. Maybe a couple of times a week. The only way I could get it to reconnect is to reboot the computer and it would be fine again. I swapped the wireless router and it made no difference. I changed wireless cards in the laptop going from a Dell card to an Intel card and it made no difference. I reloaded Windows 7 from scratch and it made no difference.

For the last year I have had the E6410. It did the same thing until I put it in hibernate instead of sleep when closing the lid. I've had it hibernate for the last 9 months or so and except for maybe once or twice it has not been a problem. For grins and giggles, I put it back in sleep mode last week and it started losing the signal every day or two again. I don't understand. Is this just me or are others seeing similar problems? It's like I've eliminated all of the variables, but the problem persists.

 

To be honest, I haven't thought about it too much, but I have the same issue on my E6410. It intermittently loses the wireless reception with no explanation. I never thought much of it when browsing the web or other daily things, but recently I started playing SWTOR so when I disconnect from the game it is very noticable and obnoxious. I've never used hibernate because I hate wasting hard drive space on it, but I might have to stop using sleep mode and start using hibernate to see if that mitigates the problem. Very interesting...

 

Are you sure it's not the router?

 

I haven't experienced it on my E6220 in the week that I've had it, but admittedly I notice things like that less when they aren't happening.

 

Pretty sure. I went from a Linksys to a D-Link and it didn't change the problem.

 

Never had a problem using mine with the Intel 6300 card in school (eduroam setup) (especially neat since there's 5 GHz coverage) except when in areas with exceptionally poor reception and high interference. In fact the 6410 seems to have pretty good antenna-design compared to most lower end laptops.

Have you guys tried running a program like inSSIDer and checking your signal levels are ok, and that there are no other networks nearby on the same channel?

 

Yes. I'm sitting in the same room with the access point and it's on a clear channel. The laptop sees and shows the signal and it is full strength. It just won't connect. If you then run the Windows troubleshooter that pops up, it offers no help. When you try to manually connect, it tries for a bit and then just says it cannot connect to the SSID. Reboot and it connects no problem. And again, this has spanned a 6400 (with 2 different wireless cards and running both Vista and 7) and 6410, 2 completely different wireless routers, and a complete rebuild of Windows 7 from the ground up twice with no effect. I only recently discovered that hibernating instead of sleeping when closing the lid had a drastic effect which prompted this query.

 

Do you have any idea about a BIOS fix for the current issue with having to disable SpeedStep to stop the non-functioning wakeups from sleep?

 

Now that's interesting, a problem spanning several hardware revisions, formats and routers...

Sleep is always kind of iffy wrt. drivers, I assume you tried the official intel drivers instead of only the Dell provided ones (the new 6300 drivers are nice, can set preferred band, and the gigabit drivers have a cable tester!).

Really the only things I can think of would be things that are similar between the environments, namely presumably what software you're running, and the environment, if this doesn't happen with other networks at other sites then there must be something nearby causing interference in just the right way to confuse the driver...