E6540 Owners Thread

So I have a E6440 coming this week and have ordered a 256GB mSATA to stick in it in addition to the 750GB hybrid Seagagte Momentus that I will move over from my current Latitude. This may be a silly question so forgive me if it is. Would it be better to put the two drives in a RAID 0 array or just put the OS and programs on the mSATA and all of the data on the hybrid?

 

Its not that you will lost some kind of performance if you don't do RAID, so I would just leave it as it is, i.e. os and frequently used programs on the mSata and additional data (movies, documents, pictures etc) on the hdd.

And you want of course the commands TRIM and garbage collection for your mSata, which I think is not possible with RAID 0 mode.

 

Everything is standard. I'll have to look into things a little more.

I bought two of these for my office and was going to end up selling one of them to replace with a desktop so now I might need to make sure one doesn't have to go back.

Edit - must have been the way I was setting everything up that first day as it seems to idle in the low 40's when using it normally

 

I know msata performance is slower than the full size, but what kind of numbers have others gotten? My crucial model is getting about half the numbers from the toshiba 2.5 unit that came with the machine - horrid.

 

This is what I get on a Plextor PX-128M5M msata drive in my E6540.

 

Turns out the partition wasn't aligned correctly from the data transfer. Performance went up considerably after doing that.

I've decided to send both of mine back though - I have experienced the throttling issues others complained about when heavily using the graphics card and that just isn't acceptable for a machine of this price.

 

Anyone know how to enable non-native resolutions and scaling? Would like to run more demanding games full screen at lower resolutions e.g. 1600x900.

 

Does anyone know when the E6540 - will be offered with the - " Intel AC - 7260 Wireless Card ? ?
... The web configurations, only list the Intel - Wireless N Card options.

 

So I've just managed to buy a E6540 from the Outlet in the UK, been waiting for a good spec to pop up for ages!

The usual i7 spec, managed to get the 9 cell battery which is pretty good. Can anyone comment on the source of these refurb machines, are they ex-review/sample or something?

Also, does the W7 licence come with upgrade rights to W8? The Dell rep I talked to was pretty useless when I asked him this question along with the pricing on a UK backlit keyboard.

 

I've bought about six refurbs for myself and other people, and my impression is that they are a mixture of:

• ex demo/review units
• machines with faulty parts replaced, eg: dead hard drives
• machines with intermittent faults, sent back by buyers - I had one with a loose LVDS cable
• machines that were sent back by clients for other reasons, eg: components not matching order, components not compatible with software (CAD and engineering companies hate Firepro GPUs).