E6520 Owner's Thread

That might explain the difference. The screen I usually see used in the Dell Latitude E6520 is the LG model I mentioned above.

 

this screen is terrible!!! I cannot believe they put such garbage in their products... everywhere i look I see vertical lines!!!

 

You could probably buy one of these to replace it with if you don't necessarily want to return your laptop: eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices

The 95% gamut matte AUO B156HW01 V4 is one of the best 15.6" FHD screens available.

No guarantees on compatibility, but if it really is a 40-pin connector then it should be compatible.

Also, question out of curiosity for the grainy panel you have: How dark is the black? Does it look grayish or does it look a solid dark color?

 

I'm not sure about the vertical lines, that was something I experienced with the 1600x900 14" panel on the e6420.

I have a LG panel and I do see grain. It's noticeable on darker colors, exacerbated by shifting your eyes while looking.

You may say 'oh, if you have to do that...' well, when you move your eyes from one part of the screen to another, thats when its noticed, which is quite often.

For example, I see grain on this thread in the Grey and Blue title bars (Home, Reviews, etc. & User CP, FAQ, etc.)

It's more noticeable on higher brightness settings.

Its also noticable if you look at the shadow of a window when you move it around...I can clearly see diagonal lines.

I've notice quite the decrease in quality of displays in general recently. Sure the technology seems to be improving (IPS, etc) but the implementation seems to be poor.

The grain on screen seems to be similar to the grain on my PenTile display in my Motorola Photon Phone...and I do not like it.

 

I have looked over this thread several times but never posted, came back just to see if anyone has tried using an SSD now that A12 is out. Look forward to your results.

 

yeah I see similar stuff... it's very disappointing that I'm going to have to look at this for years ......

 

I had time tonight to test and... With BIOS A12, the Super Talent CoreStore MV now definitely works as a storage drive. (Note: the CoreStore MV is NOT a normal mSATA device as it has a built-in disk controller whereas an mSATA drive does not). After booting, I had to install the CoreStore MV/MP Drivers drivers from the following webpage: Super Talent Technology - SSD Memory and Flash. To verify, I mounted and formatted the drive, then copied ~48GB to it (at ~67MB/s transfer speed for anyone interested). Absolutely, positively, this thing now, finally, works.

SPECULATION: The drivers appear to be the type that one can load during Windows setup to install the disk as a boot drive. I have NOT yet tested this. The drive does show up as a menu item in the BIOS boot menu. I'll post more information after I've actually tried it.

I'm excited that I can finally put this $193 purchase I made nearly a year ago to use!

 

FYI - mSATA SSD drives DO NOT work with BIOS A12. Tested with a 32GB Intel drive. The system boots, but does not recognize the drive at all in device manager. It's as if the slot is empty.

 

After a few hours of trial and error, this is what I've found AFA Windows 7 is concerned:

1) The Win7 install DVD will not allow the 64-bit CoreStore drivers to be loaded during installation. It complains that the drivers are not signed and it will not load unsigned drivers. I'm not sure if there's any way around this (i.e. building a custom WIM with the drivers already included) but it's not possible by default.

2) The Win7 install DVD does allow loading the 32-bit drivers, and can perform an installation. However, for some reason my machine locked up numerous times and I'd have to start the installation over again. I made it all the way through a complete installation (the first step before the reboot anyway) but after the reboot, Win7 was unable to boot from the CoreStore. I did make certain that the correct boot drive was selected in the BIOS, that the USB flash drive was removed, etc. Having a healthy share of experience with these things I can say that if there are this many problems with something that should be relatively simple (e.g. if it were a regular hard drive or even a USB flash drive there would be nowhere near this many problems) it makes me think there's something wrong with the BIOS, the drive's firmware, or the drivers. Or perhaps a combination. I have a couple other ideas that I'll try when I have time.

 

My E6520 has a Samsung 156HT (1920x1080), and I have not experienced any screen-door effect.