E6420 Owner's Thread

I have the second drive caddy and the extra 1st drive face plate from newmodeus. Both are OEM in fit and finish and work very well. Both accept std 9.5mm drives.

 

I guess I can't have everything:

The new laptop seems better constructed, the keyboard has a softer feel and a little less annoyingly loud. It's pretty clear comparing the two that the original was a manufacturing defect. However, the screen in the old one was:

LGD02DF

The new notebook is:

AUO313E

I calibrated the new one to get rid of the miserable blue hue cast on the whole screen, and now there's always a persistent red tint towards the top of the screen - where the colors start to invert ever so slightly due to the narrow viewing angles. It's difficult comparing them side to side which is "better"... the LG seems nicer - indeed, I barely had to adjust the colors, whereas on the AUO I had to cut the blue nearly in half.

Both are terrible compared to the IPS panel right beside them They are terribly lacking in the purple range, but my camera can't detect the difference which is so obvious to my eye, so I can't demonstrate it for you guys.

For the life of me though I couldn't get the imported color profile from Notebookcheck to do anything for me... but I've never used an ICC profile before.

 

anyone put 16gb of ram into a 6420 or 6520 yet?

 

Well, on the 6420 Dell says:

Which is interesting since the 2720qm can support up to 16. But you only have 2 DIMM slots, so 16Gb is going to be insanely expensive right now. But if you want to ship me 2 8Gb DDR3 SODIMMs, I can try it

 

Hallo


I have read about mSata in e6420 in this thread. But I am not sure: does it work, or not?

thx for your answers

turris

 

Just got mine and I'm having mixed feelings. It does get the job done, but it kinda reminds me of Certi Fit (read 'sorta fit') for cars... the finish is basically smooth where the actual finish is rough (typical for the magnesium alloy chassis I've seen before). Also, they didn't quite get the contour matched right, but it's close enough since the whole thing can shift around (the ODDs aren't screwed in or anything - just pinned). Finally, the latch mechanism is terribly machined... sticky spring, creaks, etc... luckily it's the same fit as the ODD locking mechanism so a swap is easy.

IDK why the included a nylon case for the caddy - it's not like someone is going to carry it (or the ODD) with them in it.

As for the faceplate... I'll get over it... or if I can't Ill just put the ODD plate on it (it looks like this should work, but it may not be held the same).

 

Yep, tried it, and it worked quite OK. No issues during installation, and everything run nicely. Of course being Dev Preview things weren't ironed out, but nothing that would've pointed to E6420 being the culprit.

After few days had to go back to Win7 as there was some issues with VGA output (didn't work always and occasionally crashed Windows, not even BSOD, just reboot). Also had to install a VPN client to connect customer environment, and figured it wouldn't even install on Win8 (didn't try, though).

 

Ya, I have it in a virtual machine and I'm the same way... it's definitely nothing more than a preview and nowhere near a fully functional product. In particular, there are a lot of things like scrollbars that don't work (I expect because they're focusing on touch screens at the moment and not PCs)

Edit:
Anyone else have problems with NewModeUS Caddy LED Indicator light not working? Mine doesn't flash or anything.

 

Does anyone know how to do a complete factory re-install/restore to factory image on a brand new SSD?
My E6420 came with HDD and I have just bought a m4 128gb and don't want to clone HDD to SSD..
On HP or Lenovo laptops, I just need to boot from recovery disks then the recovery program will partition/format/install windows/create recovery partition all by itself..

 

was just curious if it worked...I know the chipset supports it, so I ordered a 16gb kit to check out, I'll update this thread once it shows up.