Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge, Part 2

It should always work. If it stops working then it's something that touched it. It's software there is no mechanical part that can fail

It's been a year and half I have my laptop. The 9-cell offered me under Vista 64-bit (minimum brightness, wifi-on, Dell extended battery life, Aero ON, no transparency) almost 9 hours.
Today, the same configuration (but I switched to Win7 64-bit), I have 2 hours and half. For me it's no longer sufficient, and I need to purchase a new battery. I await for the E6410 battery to be out, as they are 90Whr instead of 85, and if I am going to cash out 200$ for one, might as well take the later, especially that it seams to be exactly the same battery. I'll just hope that the battery doesn't have a laptop specific instruction in it, so that it blocks if it's not the right laptop despite fitting. Well I guess I can return it if that is the case.

I'll be purchasing one before university starts.

 

9H thats impressive
i get 4-5 but with ~50% brightness
Just out of curiosity what brightness do you use?

 

- Minimum brightness (lowest settings possible, which is fairly bright enough in most situation for me)
- WiFi turned ON
- System idle
- Aero turn ON - Transparency OFF
- I don't have blutooth nor finger print scanner nor web cam
- 5400RPM HDD
- Using Dell extended battery life power profile (meaning my optical drive, card reader, firewire, are off)
- No USB devices connected.
- Backlit keyboard turn off.
- Speakers muted.

 

Alright
Thanks again and good luck

 

My E6400 screen is flickering rather often recently. Most probably because it switches to 40Hz refresh rates. Setting it manually to 60Hz solves the problem. The thing is that I can't find the option in the DCP where you could select which power saving measures are activated on battery. Were those options removed in den newer versions of DCP? I don't want it to switch to 40Hz! Any ideas?

Edit:
DCP Version: 1.4.0
Intel Display Driver Version: 8.15.10.2082

 

On Windows 7 (and maybe Vista) the DCP power management options have become "Dell Enhanced Settings" under Windows Power Management. My Screen Refresh Rate is "OS Controlled".

John

 

Oh, there are some things that changed in the power management options. Haven't tinkered around there for quite a while. I'm using the balanced setting 99% of the time and it says that the refresh rate is OS controlled. Does that mean that Win 7 is reducing the refresh rate? How can I prevent it from doing so?

 

I don't understand why people insist on using DCP, IMO it's a total piece of junk software that creates more problems than help. I have never used it or installed it after a clean install and I never had the urge to use it. So if you ask me I'll tell you to uninstall and use something else.

 

No it's not.
It allows me to get on-Screen notification on brightness, volume and the state of the backlit keyboard (on/off/auto), Adjust the brightness of the backlit keyboard, enable/disable recharge (Fn+ F2), and turn off the screen (Fn+D). What I do, to accelerate the account loading, is that I only leave the onScreen keyboard notification program, and the main program I load it when I need with Fn+F7.

What I do find useless is the security manager (well I don't have the finger print reader or use the card reader) add-on and the network utility (Win Vista/7 built-in solution, especially 7, is way better)

 

FN+F2 is the reason. How else could I know if the battery will be charged or not if I plug the cord in?
In any other respect this piece of software annoys me.