E6410 Owner's Thread

Free utilities like Paragon Backup and Recovery 2012 will make a true bit for bit image of your drive and allow you to rewrite the image to any other mechanical or solid state drive; even automatically resizing the relevant partition(s) if using a larger drive. Paragon will also see and play nice with any hidden or reserved OEM partitions. Yes, a fresh install of Windows is good, but there is no stability difference reimaging a drive with a known good image file, which is the standard process used by Dell and other OEM's.

Also, these current Intel chipsets want to see/utilize the Rapid Storage driver or you will not get full AHCI SATA performance. TRIM functionality is not a factor.

Anything Symantec is a system hog and in my opinion there are better options. Microsoft Security Essentials is free and very effective at protecting your system. Again, Paragon [or Acronis] is a great disk management utility that works in the background (shadow state).

Scott-

 

Are you sure RST will provide performance benefits? I saw a decrease in performance after installing RST 10.5 (on both an E4300 with PM800 and an E6410 with PM810), as well as problems with eSATA that persisted even after it was uninstalled, so I had to re-deploy both systems, which left me with a very bad impression about RST...

There have been a lot of complaints about issues with SandForce-based SSDs in Latitude systems, so I just recommend OEM SSDs to avoid taking a chance or giving too many choices. You can't go wrong with OEM...

 

Well, you guys definitely have much more expertise than I do. I can't comment on whether or not Sandforce is an issue.

Turns out the Norton Ghost thing was my true hang up. I just used Windows 7 Backup and Restore feature put an image of my drive on my NAS (think you can only do this if you have Pro or better) and followed Win7 advice and created a restore disk (which I then used to boot the system after popping in my SSD). I made sure the first thing I did AFTER popping in the SSD and BEFORE restoring was enter BIOS and switch to AHCI, then I proceeded with restoring the image by pointing recovery to the appropriate folder on my NAS. Worked like a charm, really. I'll keep you posted if I run into any BSODs or other issues after this, but WHOA WAS THERE A HUGE DIFFERENCE. This puppy is SCREAMING now.

The best thing? I did a PCMARK benchmark (the free version) and got a 1629 prior to installing the 8GB of Patriot RAM and my Samsung 830.

Result after increasing RAM and installing the SSD... 2929!!!!!!!!!!

Darn near DOUBLED my benchmark. Are you kidding me? This might be the best $280 I've spent on Amazon, ever! (paid a little extra to get the 2-day ship)

 

You need to clone the whole disk sector by sector instead but there could be alignment issues I assume.

Edit: I see you got it working with the win7 backup route. Yes SSDs are quite fast

 

i replaced my lcd, and the display cable and 5 months later the same flickering problem has returned.

Must be the motherboard killing the lcd i would think. Any idea?

 

Yes, that would be a good idea to replace the motherboard along with the LCD.

 

Apart from the motherboard, could anything be killing the screens ?(second one)

ac adapter?

 

AC adapter should be OK, those rarely go bad unless abused.

 

ok i got the screen from an amazon third party, if they will replace it then i would only need a motherboard (maybe 100-140 on ebay)

if not...that's gonna run me too much and it would be better to just get a new laptop and be done with it!

grrrrrrr!!

 

That's right...you don't have a warranty anymore. It's going to cost you about $100 for a motherboard from eBay. I think that should fix it.