Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge, Part 2

Intel Speed Steps controls also CPU voltage. Hence why I my battery life is reduced (including the power consumption which I can see in Everest), when I stress more my CPU (goes to higher clock).

I have the P8400.

 

I use RMClock on Windows 7 x64 with a P9600 CPU. What settings should I be using to maximize battery life and keeping heat down?

 

Assuming that you have adjusted the voltages to get them as low as possible without compromising stability then the real task is to avoid unnecessary CPU activity. Use the CPU time column in Task Manager to see what processes are using the CPU.

I share the view that it is not worthwhile locking the CPU down to minimum speed to conserve power. It is better to let the CPU complete any work as quickly as possible and then go back to sleep.

New Subject

The updated touchpad driver is now on the E6400 download site.

John

 

New BIOS A24:

Dell - Support

Fixes/Enhancements
------------------
1. Updated Intel(R) Active Management Technology firmware.
2. Enhanced setting of keyboard repeat rate when docking/undocking.
3. User interface change. Show warning messages to prevent user from clearing TPM when TPM is deactivated.
4. Updated thermal table for E6400 XFR only. Has no impact for E6400.
5. Updated PXE OPTROM.
6. Updated Intel Video BIOS.
7. Enhancement on Serial Over Lan support.
8. Enhanced USB mouse support in BIOS setup.
9. Enhanced the capability between Bluetooth card and NUM-Pad.
10. Updated PSA build 4127.

 

Thanks CyrusB. Time to upgrade. Interesting that they jumped to A24 from A20.

 

I'm heading back to A20........ apparently "Has no impact for E6400." is incorrect for number 4..... My fan is howling a gale right now, cpu is 41oC and GPU is 64oC and I am currently doing not much, have outlook, excel and a couple of other apps open, nothing 3d or resource intensive. So I'm heading back to A20 as in the same circumstances the fan happily sat on either nothing or the slowest setting which is near on inaudible over normal office background noise.

 

Hi!
A trouble occurred to my Dell Latitude E6400: a heavy brush (approx. 10-15 lbs.) landed from 14 feet height on corner of my bag with laptop inside it. At that moment laptop was in Hybernation (was completely off, and all the data was stored to HDD).
As a result the case of a laptop is broken. (see images below). I’m happy the screen isn’t gamaged, just the lid is little more curve.

After that laptop DID booted once into Windows Vista. Everythink was like OK.
But now it doesn’t boots BIOS. When I press power button the screen turns on (backlights), hard drive starts to spin, but no other information on the screen appears. Sometimes random arrays of white cubes (size: ~ 4 pix), appears on the screen. Also the Bluetooth indicator stays always on.

I also noticed, that the cooler fan doesn’t turns on, when I press power button. When I switch off the laptop (if the fan isn’t working I’m afraid to burn out processor), the screen turns off and the fan makes like 90 degrees turn. Not more than that.

First guess: the fan is not working that’s why laptop doesn’t boots (but something say me it would load bios anyway).

My laptop was purchased in USA, now I’m in Ukraine and have no wish to contact our Ukrainian support, because its useless here: usually it takes month or three to diagnose the problem(thich is expensive), than they say that the problem is hard and say that they might fix it if they will change the motherboard for some 500$.
I actually bought this laptop in outlet for 850$.
I’m OK with screws and stuff like that.
Maybe someone knows which parts I should check firstly?
Any ideas?
Please help.

 

Ouch!

My first recommendation would be to plug the HDD (hard disk drive) into another laptop, if you can. This is for two purposes:

1) Backup your data
2) Check whether the HDD works

Also, check out the E6400 service manual. Open up your laptop (it's very easy to remove the bottom panel, see "Replacing the Bottom Access Panel" in the link above) and take some pictures of the inside. It's very likely, as you said, that the fan is not able to spin and that that causes all sorts of trouble.

 

Looking at the base, I can see that the motherboard is most likely broken :/ The first run of the laptop was probably nothing more than luck.

Now you said a heavy brush... damn that must be one heck of a brush, and the fall must have been pretty high.

 

I took out a hard drive. Now copying all data (I have 500 Gb).
Hard drive working fine. Don’t see any problems.
Here are some more pict.

Here are some more with close up: