Latitude E4300 first impressions

An update of the seagate's driver has just been posted on the Dell's website (update marked as recommended). No more explanations. I guess this may fix your problem.

 

Otherwise more generally new updates have been posted on the Dell's website, including A05 bios firmware update and audio firmware update (solving I guess the CPU problem).

 

Anyone tested?

 

I installed latest BIOS - OK. I ran the Seagate drive fix and it resulted in drive failure. Whether the drive was failing before (possible - apart from frequent drive access had BSOD and freezing) or this fix caused failure I dont know. I am now waiting for replacement drive. Take care .....

 

No luck :-( Regarding the Bios, ok, nothing noticed so far. The fix for the Seagate drive is the same, nothing really changed (I didn't experienced your problem of frequent drive access). The update of the sound card driver do not fix the 50% cpu usage problem. Quite weird. I made these updates on my three E4300 without any problem.

 

I have been using the E4300 for a month now, I have not found any of the problems mentioned above. I have the 9400 2,4 with 4Gb RAM, and the 200Mb 7200rpm HDD, under XP SP3

I work aprox 60% office 40% outside (plane, bus, train....)

Screen is good, especially for outdoor use. Notebook looks very solid. Fan is not more noisy than other notebooks I have used, and it does not get warmer than the other ultraportables I have owned.

Keyboard is good enough (although I am not extra demanding), and the trackpad feels a little cheap but works fine after some days.

To sum up, a good purchase, I have ordered another one and a 4200

 

Hello everyone, this is my first post here.

I received my E4300 with Vista64 Ultimate one week ago. The laptop was ordered with webcam, backlite norwegian keyboard, 128GB SSD, 3 cells battery, DVDRW and 2.4Ghz CPU. Vista64 was ordered in english.

The machine felt very bloated and I was getting crashes and errors on IE and Windows Explorer, this is unconceivable, specially on a new machine, so I decided that I would reinstall and only use new drivers from the Dell site. I got the machine with the service DVD and the OS disk.

I saw is the 1GB service partition on the hard disk, but I didn't see any software or function that could access it. The contents of this partition are some files and a Windows directory, it is formated on NTFS and it is visible from inside Windows. Normally my other laptops have had some kind option on booting that access this partition for restoring the main one, or some kind of Windows shortcut to create media pulled from the partition. I did not see any of these on the E4300, so why is this partition there, I don't know. The only option at boot that I see is the diagnostics, does this run from the service partition?

The OS install (just the OS disk, not the application DVD as I wanted to download new versions of everything) went smooth but the torture came after. When you choose Vista64 on the Dell site you get 25 downloads. I can tell you that reinstalling this thing is very confusing because there are several downloads with very similar descriptions. To choose the correct install order of these files has been a pain. I have not get the fingerprint reader to work as it was working before the reinstallation, I am going to have to call Dell on Monday and ask.

As a side note I agree that the speakers are really bad. I know this is a business machine but they could have use something a little better, several machines from the competition in this size and price range use better speakers.

As I have not had the time to play with the machine I will post a deeper opinion after the reinstall is done and everything is working as it should.

 

Well, I would say that using a computer with Vista 64 bits is for people liking to be beta-testers, as some drivers and software are not working well on vista 64 - although this is undoubtedly a good choice in long term.

Regarding the Dell drivers, this is effectively the main problem I had with this computer: the one which were shipped with my laptops were outdated and I had to download and reinstall all of them - including three bios updates (computer, tpm chip and hdd), so a total of 18 different updates.

For the question of the service partition, once I saw in a dell forum that it was a reinstall partition so as to revert your laptop to the way it was sent from factory. I have not tested yet if it was the case or not, this is probably working with the diagnostic boot option, but I am not sure.

Otherwise, for info, if you want to try the h264 hardware decoding capacities of the GMA 4500HD of the E4300, you can download the trial version of powerdvd on their website. It install a codec using this capacities and the result is really nice (use it via a third party software such as media player classic homecinema (set output on EVR) - see the cccp codec pack). Unfortunately Intel is blocking the release of the specs of this chipset and apart of commercial software, there are no free software knowing how to use it (see this incredible discussion on the intel board: http://software.intel.com/en-us/for...re-for-intel-graphics-technology/topic/60703/ - undoubtedly this is an illegal restriction of competition).

 

hi guys, i'm from brazil and bought one E4300 here in dell's brazilian site, but in brazilian's site does not describe the LCD correctly and i'm afraid that the LCD could not be WLED, anyone know if all E4300 is made with 13.3" WLED LCD screen?
here in my order status describe de LCD like this:

320-7025 BLACK WS WXGA W/ LATON WLAN/CAM,LATE4300

they also told me that the E4300 is made in EUA.

sorry for the bad english.

thanks.

 

I have had Vista 64 on my main machine for more than a year without any big problems. Hardware manufacturers offer now very mature drivers for Vista64. The driver problems were at the beginning of 2007 but not now.

Vista64 (or another 64bit OS) is the only way to take full advantage of the memory if you have > 4GB RAM on your system.

Now, if Dell offers the machine with Vista64 Ultimate then they must have full support for everything on it.