E6520 Owner's Thread

Well, let's see.
New battery put into service: ~March 10th, 2012
Today's date: April 23, 2012
Total time: 44 days

Checking CPUID's PC Wizard:

Designed Capacity: 99900 mWh
Full Charge Capacity: 93040 mWh
Level: 7%

So, that puts my wear at ~0.16% wear/day. At that rate, in 6 months time, my wear will be an estimated 29%. Wow. That's terrible. Yet again, I'll be losing a 3rd of my battery in half a year.

Anyone have similar experiences??

 

Worst case...you have battery warranty for the 1st year or you buy the 3 year warranty battery.

 

Ok, so, looking for mini-PCIe SSD's with embedded controllers, I've come across two so far:

1. The 64GB SuperTalent Corestore MV, $180, available at My Digital Discount, here

2. A 64GB Sandforce controlled mini-PCIe SSD, $173, available at JoyFay (never heard of them), here

Haven't found anything else, yet...but still looking. 64GB is the minimum for a Win7 install with Office, etc....

 

I got bored waiting on my PCIE -> USB/SATA card. For anyone interested, Lion works pretty well on here. I used a vanilla ( Meaning OEM Lion ) USB key. I used shades for Semi-Dimming the screen. I also use sleepless to prevent the laptop from trying to sleep when I close the lid

The only thing that refuses to work for me is Sleep, and im working on that now. Im running Ubuntu on here as well and it DOES work properly. Im dumping my DSDT for someone to see if they can get it figured out.

If anyone is interested and needs help, just shoot me a PM and Ill help where/ when I can

E6520
Core -i7 2640m
8Gb ddr3 ( 2x4Gb )
Dedicated 120Gb 5400rpm Sata HDD
Nvidia NVS 4200m Graphics Card
Broadcom BCM94311 PCIE Card in WWAN Slot + Intel Centrino Wireless N


Screen Shot 2012-04-23 at 10.30.41 PM by pyraxiate, on Flickr

 

Be careful with the 2nd one. If you look down the page under "Typical Application" it says it's for an Asus Eee PC T91.

SuperTalent announced a 128GB version, but the last I heard of it was in this forum post 9 months ago.

 

Good catch. I'd probably just go with the Corestore anyway, considering you've already got it working....but figured I'd include it for others to know about....

R

 

My 9-cell 87Whr 3-yr warranty battery reads as follows after ~10 months of use:

Designed Capacity: 87002 mWh
Full Charge Capacity: 86414 mWh
Level: 1%

It also says:

Manufacturer: SMP
Product Name: DELL XV2VV15

 

Have you applied the sleep fix in Chameleon/Chimera?

Also, your menu bar isn't transparent... do you have QE/CI?

 

Ive applied the sleep fix from Multibeast actually ( Using a DSDT file I found floating around ). My battery shows properly, but sleep isnt quite working. Im using sleepless to keep the laptop from sleeping when i close the lid. It works pretty well otherwise and I scored 8500+ in geekbench.

Yes i have full QE/CI LOL. I just prefer it solid WoW plays decently, although i get higher framerates in Windows 7

 

After using the CoreStore for a few days, I've found it (or the driver, or the BIOS....) to be a bit flaky. Just now was the last straw:

1) During the initial installation, there was a blue screen and a couple of lockups, which I reported earlier.
2) During driver installations, one of the drivers gave me a blue screen. I can't remember which driver it was now.
3) During application installations, I found that I could not install an app from another drive without the system blue-screening. I'd have to copy the installation files to the CoreStore and install from there. I think that had something to do with the system switching between the drivers from one drive controller to the other.
4) Changing the default device boot order, which usually only requires going into the BIOS and rearranging the devices, requires doing a complete BIOS reset (Load Default Configuration) wiping out all other settings. It's kind of annoying having to have to reconfigure everything. I just learned to use F12 and pick my device at boot time, which makes booting a little less convenient.
5) Just now the system froze up completely. I was browsing the Internet and the mouse just stopped working, the keyboard became completely unresponsive and I had to hard power-off the machine.

The last one may be because I was messing with drivers by uninstalling random things and trying to get the system to recognize and install some devices I can't find drivers for. I believe someone posted the order in which drivers should be installed, and I think Dell has a document that describes the same. This weekend I plan to do a fresh re-install of everything onto the CoreStore and see if planning and doing things right has the affect of making things more stable. I do think, however, that the CoreStore driver is at least a little buggy. The driver developer is also the mod of the SuperTalent forum so once I have some good information about what goes wrong I'm going to talk with him and try to get him to stabilize the driver a bit.