E6420 Owner's Thread

I'm one of many who have. Should work fine on any QM67 notebook with 2 slots; I put in Corsair memory from Amazon - Amazon.com: Corsair 16GB Dual Channel DDR3 SODIMM Memory Kit (CMSO16GX3M2A1333C9): Computers & Accessories - and it works great. Prices have fallen like crazy on RAM in the last year, and there's not a lot of reason NOT to go to 16GB if you're a power user (although it will slightly worse on your battery life, in theory -- I haven't noticed a difference.)

I'm on A08, did the upgrade a little less than a month ago (Mar 11th), and have had zero stability problems. No noticeable speedup from 8gb most of the time, but the ability to just leave VMs running in the background (instead of having to suspend them when not in use) is huge for what I do professionally.

 

16GB is still more than double what 8GB is. Still a lot less than the 4GB I put in my E6400 some years back!

 

I bought an E6420 off Dell Outlet in the last week. Corei5-2520, 4GB ram, 320GB drive, 1600x900 display with Quadro 4200M, hd webcam, intel 6205 wifi, bluetooth, fingerprint reader, expresscard slot, smartcard slot, dvdrw, and modem.

Overall I am pretty happy with performance and quality for the price I paid, which was about 55% of the full list price. I note that variants with 1600x900 display and nvidia graphics sell quite quickly off Outlet, the lower spec ones and high spec tend to hang around much longer, but the sweet spot of good display + graphics + good CPU are very popular. I am sure I have seen some reappear on Ebay soon after with a 20% markup!

The only thing I would have liked was a backlit keyboard. The modem was a surprise TBH.

This is a personal laptop, my employer provides a Dell E6510 with core2duo and intel graphics which is fine for the work I do. The E6420 is significantly lighter and less industrial than the 6510. I considered and dropped idea of E6520 due to weight, we have a couple of E5520's at work and they're much bulkier, I note that whilst outwardly similar the 64xx with metal frame has a much more sturdy chassis than the 55xx.

My previous laptop was a Toshiba Tecra M9 (1440x900 with Nvidia Quadro) which was my work computer and I bought it off my old employer (so I knew it hadn't been abused; it's going strong at nearly 5 years old as my wife's computer now). I would say the E6420 is superior in build quality to it and is much more pleasing to the eye!

I miss the E6510's battery indicator, and I am wondering whether I will miss the microphone socket (I wondered whether it was a three-ring jack for headset somehow?). There's sufficient room on the 6420 to space some of the keys out more, so I feel Dell have crammed them in too close, I prefer somewhat the layout of the Tecra, but the key feel is quite reasonable and thankfully Dell haven't adopted the stupid recent fashion of chiclet keys or floating islands!

The speakers seem reasonable quality but not too loud - no obvious way to boost volume running linux anyway.

The display is good, much better than the Tecra which was dim and lacking in colour saturation and contrast by comparison. Viewing angle side to side is quite good, but above and below is relatively narrow, I find myself adjusting the screen angle quite a bit when I adjust my posture.

Linux runs well, once I destroyed the UEFI boot and set up an old-fashioned MBR partition! Everything in openSUSE12.1 seemed to work out of the box, I installed the nvidia binary drivers from their FTP site.

Win7-x64-sp1 installs out of the box and supports the 1600x900 display, BUT you'll need to install network driver to make it useful, so I downloaded them using the linux install, saving into the FAT32 partition I always create for sharing files like downloads.

 

Anybody have experience/tips with a fresh windows install on their E6420. My very old Precision 380 with a pentium D processor and windows 7 32 bit boots up faster than my laptop. Also my laptop seems quite slow for the first 2-5 minutes of use. I run on Ultra Performance every time I am plugged in. Here are my specs

i5-2410M
4GB 1333 1 DIMM
320GB 5200RPM
Nvidia 4200M
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit

I guess my questions is how big of it is a task to reinstall all of the dell drivers on the E6420 so I can get a good clean install after a fresh new copy of Windows 7?

 

e6520/e6420 Driver Install List

 

That 5,400 rpm hard disk will make things sluggish. Bin it for an SSD and it will boot in 15 seconds.

 

anybody know of an optical bay adapter that would expose its sata header as an additional eSata port?

btw - here's another one reporting 16Gb recognized by the mobo, no problem. my chips are gSkill, bought as a pair.

 

are you trying to fit a 2nd hard drive?

2nd Hard Drive Caddy DELL E6520, E6420, E6320 E-Module Bay [DELL-2BAY-E6520] - $48.95 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

 

i already got this kind of a caddy - it's good, but i need a 2nd eSata, not a 2nd internal HD.

i'll hang a raid-box off of it. besides the optical bay header is sata 3, the built-in eSata is sata 2 - a design flaw common to all the manufacturers, not just michael.

 

doesn't the docking bay have an eSata (pSata?) on it?