Latitude E6400/E6500 good and bad thread

I think it could be a good thing to summarize what is good and bad about Latitude E6400 and E6500 in a separate thread. Especially for newcomers it is a little bit hard to find this information in the 135 pages long E6400 Owner's lounge thread. I will start with my experiences after seven weeks use of my Latitude E6400.

My specs
E6400 with P8600 CPU, Intel Graphics, 1280x800 CCFL screen, 160 GB 7200 RPM HD, Intel 5100 WiFi, Bluetooth, 6-cell battery, E Port Plus docking station, Windows XP Pro with SP3 (own installation).

Good
Very good Windows XP performance with own installation
LCD screen has good brightness and contrast
Battery life is great
Overall temperature of CPU, chipset etc is low
Audio quality in general is good on my laptop, no skips or crackling audio
Hard drive and DVD drive are 100% stable in ATA/IDE compatible mode
The laptop has a good selection of ports that are mostly located in good positions.
Light and thin design
Fast 7200 RPM hard drive that is also quiet for being a 7200 RPM drive.

Bad
SATA drivers for running in native SATA mode (AHCI/IRRT) are not 100% stable causing some problems with DVD drive and eSATA drives. See below for details.
Fan is set programmed to run a little bit too often/too fast. See below for details.
Occasional delays in Windows Explorer when clicking on folders. This seems to be caused by a lag that appears when the sound "Start Navigation" is played when clicking on a folder.
USB ports on the back of the docking station wiggle a little bit. I will get a replacement docking station that I hope will fix this problem.
Fingerprint reader is connected to a peculiar "Broadcom USH CV" device making it inaccessible for standard fingerprint software. I have got myself a UPEK USB fingerprint reader instead that works much better.
Dell ControlPoint software is bloated and not entirely stable. I have only installed the System Manager part that is more or less necessary and also works better than the other parts.

Overall impression
I am satisifed with my E6400. It is fast, has the features I need and is running cool. There are however some things I think Dell should have put more effort into before releasing the laptop like the buggy SATA drivers, nonstandard fingerprint device and the fan programming. I think Dell will eventually fix these problems but I do feel a little bit like a beta tester. If I had known about the problems before my purchase, I would probably have purchased the older (and hopefully more stable) Latitude D830 model instead.

SATA AHCI/IRRT mode details
My laptop was delivered with SATA mode set to IRRT which is a variant of SATA RAID mode. I run the laptop in this mode for a couple of weeks and it was mostly stable but not 100% stable. The system would sometimes hang when accessing the DVD drive or the eSATA drive and there were a few entries in the event log about timeouts and errors when accessing DVD and eSATA drives. When I made a fresh installation of Windows XP I choose to set the SATA mode to ATA/IDE compatible and since then it has been 100% stable and I haven't noticed any loss in performance. On the contrary, I was able to measure a signicant increase in raw file copy performance. But the eSATA port is disabled in ATA/IDE mode and this is of course a drawback of using this mode. I am willing to pay this price to get a 100% stable system.

Fan noise details
It seems that as soon as either chipset, GPU or memory reaches 50 C, the fan will start running at maximum speed of 4800 RPM and this fan speed is very noisy. When doing light work on the laptop (web surfing, writing documents etc), the chipset temperature seems to reach a temperature of approximately 23-25 C above the room temperature with the higher temperature is when running in the docking station with the lid closed. This is ok for me in winter time when the temperature in my apartment is approximately 21-23 C since the chipset temperature will stay at 44-48 C, a few degrees below the 50 C threshold. At this temperature, the fan will run at 3000 RPM which is quite silent. However, during summer time there is often 26-28 C in my apartment and this will probably cause the chipset temperature to reach 50 C and my fan will run at 4800 RPM which is simply not acceptable because of the noise level. I have reported this problem to Dell and I really hope they will do something about it (before summer). After all, 50 C shouldn't be a problem to the chipset. And why doesn't Dell use the available and less noisy 3600 RPM fan mode first before going to 4800 RPM? So while I don't have a problem with fan noise right now I expect to get a problem in summer time and I think this is a bit sad since I have never had a laptop before that has been generating less heat than this one.


Anyone else that would like to summarize their experiences without writing a full review?

Örjan

 

Nice thread; as one planning to purchase the e6400 sometime next year, I appreciate the insights. Shame no one else has responded though... Other thoughts, anyone?

 

How about Raid support?

I just added a 2nd hard drive (replaced DVD drive on media bay) in my E6500, and lo and behold, when I rebooted , it gives me option to create a Raid volume

SSD Raid anyone?

 

You can check these 2 threads for positive words on the E6500. The first is mine, and while I haven't had it very long or used it all that much, I like it and think it is great. The only negative is that it will not connect to my wireless network at anything over dial-up speeds, but from my Google research I think that is a Vista problem and not a Dell problem. (I have a Toshiba with the same problem, and according to Google, half the country has the same problem.)

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=335050

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=299501

I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 that I've had for 5 years and it still works very well. My new E6500 is very much better made than the Inspiron. The Inspiron is all plastic, and flexes and creaks when you move it around. The E6500 looks and feels very solid. The screen on the Inspiron is fairly dull, with not very good colors, the E6500 is bright and colorful. The E6500 is fast, but has good battery life.

 

This was on my to-do list but it dropped out of sight.

For my E6400:

The good

• The LG WXGA+ display
• Excellent battery run time (up to 6 hours with the Intel graphics)
• Very solid build
• Cool running
• Excellent keyboard action
• Quiet fan except when under maximum load
• The backlit keyboard option
• eSATA
• USB Powershare
• The very compact optional 65W AC/auto/air adaptor

The bad

• Heavier (2.31kg) than suggested by the headline weight in the specs
• The display bezel needs some rubber bumpers to stop it damaging the palmrest
• The audio quality (both speaker size and the buggy driver - need to disable internal speakers to get bass on external audio - appeared to be fixed by latest driver but does work after reboot)
• If the fan goes to fast then it keeps running for too long
• Bloated Dell software
• Buggy security software

Drivers, software and BIOS must be treated as work in progress and are fixable. There have been noticeable improvements during the past few months and I hope the remaining issues will be fixed.

John

 

Bad things:
Still having stability issues despite a fresh install of Vista; a motherboard and RAM change with BSOD errors on startup.

Taking a total stab at the dark, I've changed the BIOS mode to ATA to see if that makes a difference.

Good things:
Fantastic keyboard (though I forgot to order the backlit) and LCD screen.
Battery life of 5+ hours with a standard 6-cell and 4 USB ports on a 14".
Fast HDD - 7200rpm Seagate Momentus 7200.3 here.

 

My refurb E6500 from the outlet center has NO bloatware. There was hardly anything on the machine from Dell.

 

There's a subtle difference between bloatware and bloated software. Look at the file sizes of the various Dell applications such as the Security Manager and Communication Manager. Hundreds of megabytes isn't a good indicator of efficient programming (and a nightmare to download for anyone who doesn't have a fast internet connection).

John

 

This is a great idea, Orjan.

Good:

LCD WXGA+ Display -- even the AUO, which I have
Battery Time -- the 6-cell gives me 4+ hours
Build Quality -- impressive overall, although John Ratsey has documented an issue with the LCD closure being a bit "sloppy", a design flaw I also have on my E6500
Keyboard -- near ThinkPad quality, and the backlighting is great
Quiet

Not So Good:

Heavy -- it's heavier than one might expect, although I use mine primarily as a desktop replacement, so it's not a big deal for me
Dell ControlPoint Software -- this is a work-in-progress; my Intel 5300 wireless card isn't supported yet, for example
Sound -- the speakers can kindly be described as "shallow" and the IDT drivers need work, as do the Dell drivers for the NVS160M

Generally, I'm a happy camper, and I figure that Dell will need to continue to improve both the ControlPoint software and the drivers if they want to sell these to the corporate-types.

 

i loved my inspiron 8600. but it was practically falling apart by its 5th year and then i accidentally spilled beer on it

might try disassembling it and washing it with distilled water sometime in the future in an attempt to revive/refurbish it lol.

the E6500 chassis is the same as the precision m4400. really feels well built, although the palmrest is snap on, and if you ever have to change the motherboard and remove the palmrest, it never fits back as well as it did before you took it apart. Fortunately, because of the large access panel at the base of the notebook, short of changing the motherboard you probably wont ever have to remove the palmrest.