Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge, Part 2

Anyone have problem with wake up from suspend to ram\suspend to disc under windows xp? I have 50% of booting fails, suspend to ram wake up ends with 'black screen', with suspend to disc option progress bar goes to 100% and nothig hapen then.

 

I've had that happen in the past but not with my E6400 when it was running XP.

Is your XP factory installed? If not, did you install Dell's System Software package which includes a whole load of patches?

John

 

Factory OS was vista. I have also e6500 with same OS\software installed, this problem come once 2-3 month on it.

 

My winxp is factory installed and up to date. In the year I have owned the E6400 the suspend has almost never worked. Once in a while it does but I never rely on it. Have to go through the entire boot sequece every time.

I always chocked it up to this pc being designed for vista or win7 and our company being stuck in xp.

My previous D610 worked every time. This one never has worked

 

Windows XP on a modern system (2005 or newer) does NOT run well. I remind you that XP is Windows 2000, which is NT 4 which is NT3. NT3 was released in 1993. Hence why its full of security wholes (security was not the first thing in mind back in 1993... I remind you that in193, that was before the internet concept as we know it today).

XP doesn't even know what half the technology is on your system is really. XP it optimized and design for really old hardware, for example: pre-PCI sockets (it's this really long black one, which I forgot the name), PCI, AGP, systems with bellow 512MB of memory, hard drives on IDE, single core processors with under 512KB of L2 cache, and so on.

Look anywhere and on any system past 2005, you can clearly see that sleep function is very hit and miss. Anything from not executing the proper procedure on a device, to driver conflict (driver conflict has been fix in Vista core (kernel) engineering).

To utilize the full power of your system, and have it properly managed, you need Vista 64-bit minimum (32-bit doesn't use your CPU-bit CPU, and is a bug fest of a last minute OS version decision which destroyed the OS reputation).

Call Dell tech support, tell them that you can't use your full 4GB of RAM (which you can in a 32-bit OS), and they'll send you Vista 64-bit. Or get to the store and get Win7 upgrade, and put that, and enjoy the full power and technology of your system.

Everyone passes through this. Everyone was forced to learn a new OS (windows 7, which is a good learning curve from XP for those who skip Vista, and it's going to be even steeper curve when Win8 comes out if you decide to wait).

I for one, was very happy with Windows 2000, yes I was 1 hair from skipping XP all together back in Jan 2006 when I build my own desktop. When I noticed that Windows 2000, was stuck at 256 colors, 640x480, and that moving a window was a slide show, oh and that the install of my system was corrupted as I was missing SATA drivers. I had to fund myself Windows XP, until Vista came out. XP was running like in your system, sleep did not work, sound card was working when it wanted, wake up from hibernate was making me losing my USB's. When Vista 64-bit was out, I got it, and installed it, and everything worked PERFECTLY. Then later on I tried Vista 32-bit because I wanted to see what was all the rage on "Vista the sucky OS" claim, and yes, it ultra bugy, heavy and all that, I ran back to Vista 64-bit.

Anyway, Windows 7 Pro and up has XP Mode and Virtual PC complete with IE6, can't you use that to run your XP only applications for the office?

 

This might be relevant to the black screen problem.

The other place to look is under the power management properties for the GPU. Do you have Intel or nVidia?

John

 

Nvidia. E6500 with same specs\drivers\software\os have no this issue.

 

No, unfortunatly in a large corporate multi-national company, you do not install a new os on your laptop. Too many networked apps, too many multiuser databases that all have to work the same for everyone world wide. I am stuck on XP until the company upgrades. They will, for most IT stuff our engineering firm is pretty up to date. Vista nearly launched and was recalled a few years ago. Win7 will go forward. Until then, I'd like to get this laptop working as well as can on XP.

 

I have an nVidia GPU. What am I looking for in power management?

 

Anything that mentions S3.

John