E6420 Owner's Thread

I favor the North Face Recon if you are not looking for max space. It will hold the 14" in a Dell neoprene sleeve. It has good features... heavy gage zips with rain flaps, good harness system with sternum strap and stowable waist strap, simple exterior with a touch of reflective material and a full-size mesh pocket on the back for wet gear, and quick access wallet/keys pocket on top. And the North Face lifetime warranty.

GK

 

Have a look at the Swissgear backpacks. I have a couple which are well padded but are relatively light considering the capacity. They also have plenty of useful pockets. I can't, however, advise on which might be a good fit for the E6420.

john

 

Great! Thank you. Looking forward to the pics. I'm pretty sure the T520 and W520 use the same panel.

 

Is it true that e6420 has only one speaker = mono? , i've just noticed that info in the following review : Review Dell Latitude E6420 Notebook - Notebookcheck.net Reviews

 

Does not appear to be correct; there are two speakers, along the bottom of the front side, both left and right. The quality is not super, with more clipping at higher volumes than the E6500 or E6410, and the location means that depending on where you're using it, you may lose a LOT of volume - it's perfectly audible if not very loud docked at work, but on a soft surface (bed, or on the couch with a blanket) it is difficult to get useful volumes out of.

 

+1
I turned off LPM on my second go-around when reformatting and it's significantly faster. No stutter at all.

 

Another +1. I don't know if this was the solution, or enough refreshes fixed the issue but I disabled LPM and re-enabled SpeedStep and everything seems okey-dokey. I will continue testing to see if things still freeze.

 

@Dezoris Thanks for your partial teardown photos on internals.

Current specs dont make clear which of the '1 Full and 2 Half Mini Card Slots' are free, and which are used by WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G minicards. I gather Dell do not offer the Intel 6230 WiFi+BT3 combo adapter [dual band (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz), 2x2 adapter 300 Mbps] which I think means if you want WiFi & BT you lose 2 minicard slots ?
As E6x20 has no mSATA slot or 2nd SATA cable, I was thinking to benefit from SSD perfomance by fitting a small miniPCIe SSD to hold just OS+Apps.

I see the WiFi minicard +3antenna wires in your photo 055 and what looks like a WWAN area, not neccessarily miniPCIe, on its left, but no sign of a 3rd miniPCIe slot.

Are you able to have another look and tell me if the BT3 takes up a PCIe slot for itself, and where the 3rd slot is located ?

Also, have you tried to obtain the 'Owners Manual' ?
That normally illustrates where all replaceable items go and how to change them, and is usually a ~200 page PDF on Dell's support page, but to date the E6x20 Owners Manual has not appeared online.

 

The Dell Wireless 375 Bluetooth does not use a minicard slot. It's something else entirely.

 

Another tip: Use DPC latency application DPC Latency Checker, to check out your latency issue. If you have a downwards pattern of irregular interval of 1000ms to 200ms, make sure your media card reader is disabled from the Intel PCI Express Root Port 6 - 1C1A.

Use Dell power management to help disable it or BIOS....