E6420 Owner's Thread

Thanks for the reply.
In the meantime I received the dual heatpipe cooler too. I made a few cuts with a small metal saw, broke the stuff off with some pliers and filed the edges smooth.
The cooler works like a charm, idle temps are down 10-12°C and the fan is barely spinning up.

 

Good to hear your experience

Cheers

 

Six and a half years old and still working. This thing has taken a lot of punishment and is still in okay shape compared to many laptops I've owned in the past.

The only sticking point is that disk freezing situation. It's been starting to become pretty bad, so I just bought a new Precision 7520 when Dell was having a sale (even on discount and doing third-party upgrades, it cost a lot more...

Back to the E6420:
- Replacement 9-cell 87Whr battery still going strong (it should, it's still relatively new!). It can run for hours without issue.
- Never ended up replacing the tiny screws on the ODD.
- Drive still gives that random freezing where the LED sticks solid (even when there's a 10% buffer) and the GUI still works but the OS stops responding. I've switched the drivers to the standard Microsoft AHCI drivers after reading this article: https://social.technet.microsoft.co...-intel-r-rapid-storage-technology-driver.aspx. I was having really weird problems on my new Precision which only went away after doing this, so I figure that Intel has bad storage drivers and Dell never updates them anyway.
- Drive sometimes isn't detected on startup. I'm wondering if it has something to do with this: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-s-defective-Sandy-Bridge-Chipsets-Status-Report.45596.0.html (the stepping is the fixed one, but it could be the fix was only partial)
- Speakers don't work anymore at all except in the diagnostics. It is highly likely it's related to the VGA board, since the phono jacks on the same board (might order a replacement board from dell parts people at some point).
- Managed to upgrade the nVidia graphics drivers using drivers from nVidia's site without breaking Optimus (finally).
- Still running Windows 7.

I'll probably be reinstalling it on a fresh new SSD, but except for the lack of built-in USB 3.0 ports (which partially offset by using a USB 3.0 ExpressCard 34 or 54 card), this model is still quite usable and powerful enough to keep up with low to mid-range current models (though this is largely because Intel slowed down due to lack of competition and the focus on power efficiency over performance).

Things I liked:
+ Mobile powerhouse
+ Decent CPU (I bought the quad core i7)
= Memory (two sockets... though this is an Intel limitation unless you have a workstation model)
+ Expansion capability (ExpressCard, E-Modular bay, internally had mPCIe ports for WWAN and WiFi)
+ Native docking station.
+ Was still able to get a genuine battery after 5 years.
+ Comfortable keyboard.
+ Backlit keyboard option.
+ Easily removable battery (though it did stick out a bit).
+ Mostly stable initial loadout.
(= Happens to work with eGPU.)

Things that were annoyances:
- Extremely crappy GPU that wasn't really that much better than integrated. (I guess that's why newer Latitudes only have iGPU).
- Optimus got broken very easily if things weren't installed in the correct order using specific driver versions (breaking the brightness controls too).
- Non-standard footpads are bonded to the bottom plate and can't be properly replaced without changing the whole bottom plate.
- Locked into OEM validated drivers for quite a few things, but new validated drivers were rare and stopped showing up on on the Support site.
- No IPS option nor 1080p option (but that came in later models after they switched from LVDS to eDP)
- No instructions on how to use the fingerprint reader (never ended up using it).
- Plastic/rubber palmrest picks up oil and starts cracking up after a while.

All in all, it was more or less a great buy. Hoping my new Precision lasts as long.

Thanks for the info, though I don't think the problem is TRIM or GC is the problem because I have a lot of other desktops and laptops running nearly full like that and I've never that issue (only on this laptop). We'll see if switching the Intel AHCI driver to Microsoft fixes the issue.

 

The only time I've encountered the freezing problem you described is when I first had my Samsung NP900X3B which had only 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD (this was the early days of the mSATA format). I was used to higher capacity SSDs so this 128GB was nearly full. Then, whenever I was loading something extra into the RAM the computer would freeze while some RAM contents were being dumped into the swap file concurrently with reading off the SSD. The problem went away once I was able to get a 256GB SSD.

John

 

I just recently found this thread and decided to put some insight to my E6420 ownership experience.
Pros:
- Extremely cheap (I bought mine used)
- Great build quality
- Pretty good reliability; it hasn't done BSOD on me yet whereas my previous D630 did that all the time
- Batteries are now extremely cheap (~$35 for a genuine 9 cell on e-Bay)
- IMO looks are almost at modern levels
- Display has held up well (1600x900)
Cons:
- Bottom of display bezel is laughably flimsy
- If you push too hard on the palmrest near the HDD, you will kill the drive (I found that out the hard way trying to get rid of a bump)
- Battery life isn't great, at least with a 6 cell
- No USB 3.0
- Top lid gets absolutely coated in fingerprints

P.S. for anyone wondering, an Intel graphics board swap with an Nvidia graphics board is possible, and I've done it
Just make sure you order the Nvidia heatsink and the I/O board (P/N: 03258H) before hand.