E6420 Owner's Thread

If it's a refurb, there's no way of knowing if that was the original reason for the return. With outlet, sometimes it's open box, or sometimes it really has a fault with it.

It is normal for *any* laptop to get warm. Hot is another story -- only should get hot under load. If your IE froze, maybe it was maxing out the CPU for some reason, check Task Manager. Maybe some plugin or Flash ad is killing it.

Also, I think the quad cores have a bigger heatsink compared to the dual cores. Was that dual or quad you had?

Err... with HP trying to commit corporate suicide by exiting the PC business when that's one of their primary businesses? I would rethink that decision. At least go with Lenovo if you don't want Dell.

The E6420 has an eSATAp port and the ePort Plus has one too. You could possibly get RAID working on this to mirror or create a recovery backup of your main drive (the options are in the Intel RAID BIOS if you enable it).

Haven't installed it yet. Anyone try booting with an ExpressCard eSATA adapter with this new BIOS?

 

We opted to buy some SSD's, and I ran some tests on what dell gave us....also did an ATA and AHCI test, which someone was curious about earlier.

E6420 SSD benchmark ATA vs AHCI – Samsung 128GB SSD Model: MZ-7PA1280/0D1 | Vivi The Mage

 

I just bought a E6420 with 32-bit Windows 7 a week ago. Yesterday, when my SSD arrived (Crucial M4) I reinstalled a fresh windows 64-bit. But it is not a Dell OEM Windows. After fresh installation the battery life is kinda worse, at least in terms of what it shows in the battery information. I check system config and see that the CPU always run at 2.5GHZ. Is this the reason for the decrease in battery life? I don't remember correctly but the 32bit windows alwasy show ~1GHZ I think, but I'm not sure.

 

Err, did you install all the drivers and the Dell Power Management software?

If you didn't, it probably won't be able to turn off devices to save power (and reduce battery life).

I had turned off Optimus at one point and battery life was noticeably dropping faster since it was using standard VGA drivers rather than the NVS4200 ones. Under the default install, the drivers aren't automatically loaded for the GPU when you disable Optimus for some reason. You have to tell it to auto-detect the drivers and only then will it pick up on it and use them (probably the way the machine profile was installed). I had only noticed AFTER it BSoDed on me when I was trying to enable more than one external monitor.

 

Wow, This Samsung SSD is really slow and expensive. You can take Crusial M4 with street price $250 and much faster.

 

The fan on my E6420 now blows constantly. What have you all been doing to counteract that? Dell wants me to run diagnostics....which are useless.

 

I reported turbo boost problem of BIOS A06. Looks like they start working on it.

Mr. Lee,
Thank you for the information. I am going to try and duplicate this issue in our lab. I am able to do so, I will have to get this case over to another team that works directly with our engineers. I appreciate your patience as we research this further.
Thank you for contacting Dell
Stephanie, UI: 195022
CBG/SMB Resolution Expert Center
Original Message Follows: ------------------------
See link below in notebook forum.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-latitude-vostro-precision/564579-e6420-owners-thread-61.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-latitude-vostro-precision/565905-e6520-owners-thread-47.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-latitude-vostro-precision/565905-e6520-owners-thread-48.html

Not only E6420, but E6520 user also have same turbo boost issue after bios update to A06.

Thanks,

 

Nice. Thanks for reporting the bug and inform us. i hope they find a solution soon. Meanwhile i am running A05. The first who discovers a workaround or that they fixed the bug, please post it here.

Ciao
G.

 

New ControlPoint System Manager as of 9/12/2011
Version A03
Here you go!

 

Have you checked for software causes? A process stuck and running one core (/vcore if you have HT on) at 100% will do that.

As will having processes constantly running on the Nvidia chip (there is a widget you can turn on to show which processes are running on Nvidia, which shows in the task bar.)