Latitude E6400 A31 & A32. Differences?

Hi,

Can anyone here comment on the differences in A31 and A32? Dell is advertising A31 for my service tag (Latitude E6400 ATG) and I only found out about A32 by accident. Dell does not advertise it as the latest update. The digital signatures show signing dates that aren't chronological:
E6400A31.EXE - ‎Friday, ‎April ‎13, ‎2012 4:01:21 AM
E6400A32.EXE - ‎Wednesday, ‎April ‎11, ‎2012 9:47:37 PM

I am apprehensive about any manufacturer's attempts to fix overheating issues, frankly. HP used to send out a "fix" that made the fan run all the time at full speed for some of their overheating laptops. It didn't fix anything.

Also another thing holding me back is I read on Dell's forum board where a guy who enabled 'Signed Firmware Update' now can't update his BIOS:
Latitude E6400 BIOS update not possible

So what do you guys think of A31 and A32, those of you that are running it?

I turned on my laptop this afternoon and after scanning my fingerprint the windows display never came up (it was a resume from hibernate). I could see the hard drive was working for like 5 min but no display. So I did a FN + Sleep and the laptop went into sleep, then when I pressed the power button it came out of it and the display came up properly. That ever happen to anyone?

 

I run A32. No problems so far. The fan speeds are the same as before.

 

Ok thanks. Does your fan ever shut off or does it just cycle down to the point where you do not hear it? Do you know why Dell is advertising A31 and not A32?

 

I was on A30, the Dell site gave me the option for A31, but when I looked in other versions, there was A32 there as well.

Both were released on April 26th.

Upgraded to A32, lets see what difference I can feel now.

 

This is what I found about A32 in the E6400 Owner's Lounge Thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...0-owners-lounge-part-2-a-132.html#post8374792

So I am going to flash A31 now, as I do not have any significant heat issues with my Nvidia GPU and would like the increased performance.

Will update if the downgrade is successful.

Update: Successfully downgraded to A31.

 

One of our Nvidia E6400s is on A32:

1) The fan does shut off completely; it is usually shut off when the unit is idling or under light load.
2) GPUZ does not indicate any downclocking, but I'm not sure if it is actually reading from the GPU.

This unit isn't used too much, but in general I have not noticed any practical difference between A32 and the previous revision on which this machine was (probably an A2x).

 

Yes, the fan shuts off completely. Same behaviour as before; the fan doesn't run as long as the chipset temp is below 45 C.

 

Ok thanks for the advice everyone. I'm sticking with my current BIOS for now but I will upgrade at some point. If anyone encounters any problems with the downclock BIOS please add them here.

 

^Update to my earlier post.

I upgraded the Bios to A32 about a month back. The laptop has been running fine and as such I have not noticed any decrease or increase in performance. Having used both A31 and A32 for about a month each, I can't feel any difference in them.

Sticking with A32 as of now.