Latitude 6430u owners thread

Hi,

No one here has the odor problem with 6430u ??? I have been waiting for 6430u for a long time after my E4300 (and during that time resisting not to buy a Lenovo X1 Carbon). After using the new 6430 for few days I am totally disappointed and sorry for DELL.

I saw some claims around and replies from DELL stating that the problem can be from the air vents and can be solved simly by aeration!!! Definitelly this problem has nothing to do with air vents. I know little bit about plastics and I am quite sure that the problem is originated from the polymer used in the case of the laptop (top, buttom, keypad & palmrest) This polymer is mixed & molded with special additives and plastifiers (to accomodate the soft touch affect). Some of those chemicals are now migrating to the surface and creating this awful odor. Besides the odor, I am aslo more concerned about the possible negative health effects of these chemicals which are absorbed by our body through contact with skin and inhalation.

I am sure that everybody in DELL well aware of this problem (as long as they have functioning nasal receptors). This can never be considered as an acceptable defect and I can not imagine how DELL can realease such a flagship model to the market in such condition?

again big disappointmet!

 

Just an FYI for the apparently small number of owners out there. I just checked and there is a new BIOS (A06) and a new version of the WIGIG D5000 dock driver and firmware up on the Dell website

Don't really see any difference, the fan is still pretty obtrusive and the dock is still as finicky as every but I live in hope! I've resorted to using my old E4300 and E-Dock for my everyday office and travel machine, it does everything I want, it's smaller, lighter, has 4+ hour battery life and has a Samsung 840 SSD boot and a 750G 7200 RPM second HDD. Not really progress but I think the E4300/4310 were the pinnacle of Dell's Ultrabook designs, even if they weren't called ultrabooks then. The 2 HDD option, small case, battery slice and regular eSATA HDD are perfect. I should have bought a XPS-12 but that had no docking capabilities at all.... I just can't understand how a 14" notebook can be called an Ultrabook. I have a Lenovo U150, at 11.1", 8GB RAM, 5+ hour battery, Core2Duo CULV, and an SSD.... I'd call that an Ultrabook....

 

I am having the exact same resolution problem with some projectors. It chooses 1024x768 and the box is greyed out and cannot be changed. Doing presentations is a big part of my job so when it looks stupid so do I...did you ever come to a solution?

Gareth

 

For everyone with noisy fan issues-

See the information that Dell has posted regarding the problem- LINK

It basically says that an "alignment issue during manufacturing was determined to be the cause of the noise."

RESOLUTION- "The affected parts have been eliminated from stock and replacement of the fan through Dell support resolves the noise issue. If you have a fan noise issue on a Dell Latitude 6430u, contact Dell Technical Support for resolution."

I contacted Tech Support and was told that some "non-functional" internal parts of my system need to replaced to resolve the issue. They're sending me the box to ship it back for repair in 1-3 days, then it will take 7-10 days to get it back. We'll see how it turns out..

In the meantime, I have learned that pressing Fn + Z will turn the fan off unless the max. temp is reached.

 

Recently bought this model (Latitude 6430u), just unpacked, using pre-installed SW (W7 Pro+other dell sw), but I am getting all the time after wake-up from hibernation high DPC spikes -> 20% CPU usage on interrupts. Simple solution is restart, or just putting OS into sleep (not hibernation!) after wake-up the interrupts are gone.

used sw
- Resplendence Software - LatencyMon: suitability checker for real-time audio and other tasks
- Process Explorer

This behavior might result into high temp emit from CPU -> noisy fan and then finally damaged HW.

Issue might be either on some particular driver, the dell pre-installed software, dell power plan, wifi driver (disabled the wake up signal in the wifi adapter - cause the nb was booting up from hibernation spontaneously after 10-30 seconds)




Anybody else with this problem?

#latitude #6430u #DPC #interrupts

 

I had Dell come out and replace my fan, and I'm not sure if it's really helped. The fan is amazingly small, and I just don't see how something that small would ever be quiet when running (small fans means high RPMs to move air, and high RPMs means higher frequency noise, which is easier to hear and more bothersome)

 

Yes, I have this problem and opened an issue with Dell about it. They prefer to blame it on the fact that I'm using a self-installed version of Windows instead of the Dell image it came with. Someone else posted that they were using the Dell image, but that didn't help. So far Dell has not provided a resolution or acknowledged the problem as far as I can tell.

So far I just try to keep updated with drivers, and not sleep the machine. I'm not traveling with it too much, so I can avoid sleep as much as possible. For me it's only resolved by a reboot, which luckily is very fast with the SSD.

 

@GazParkinson --> No unfortunately I never solved this issue. I also connect it to a variety of projectors and screens almost daily and there is certainly something amiss with this machine as compared to other Dell notebooks.
I have resorted to travelling with an older E4300 which is rock solid. I have a colleague who also has a 6430u and he claims to have never seen the issue. I briefly tried a displayport to VGA adapter which seemed to work but I can't rely on this machine, too many goofy issues and really I would not ever call it an ultrabook. My E4300 is smaller and in everyday use, is just more usable!

 

Just noticed new drivers for the mousepad, mSATA and WiGig dock were posted in the last few days. No noticeable difference. I didn't install the mSATA firmware update as the readme is intentionally vague on whether this will require re-installing everything - the first point in the readme is to backup the SSD. Later on it mentions just booting back into Windows. At any rate, since it is working I'm going to leave that one.... Overall I'm still ambivalent about this machine. It has too many things that just don't seem to work right and Dell have moved on to Haswell. This machine was an in-between platform prototype for the new Haswell's and it doesn't look like that many people purchased it, judging by the deafening silence in this thread.... Oh well, at least I still have my trusty E4300.

 

The release notes for the drive firmware update say that it fixes a 30 second freeze-up, which I have definitely seen almost every day. All release notes for anything that touches a drive are going to tell you to make sure you have a backup, but if really was going to be a problem the warnings would be much more clear. I just updated mine, and so far everything looks fine.

Did anyone else apply the IDT audio drivers and get red popups that they are not signed?