Latitude E6500 Owner's Lounge

sorry for the late reply, been busy at work lately... here's my specs...

Intel Core 2 Duo P9600
Windows Vista Business 64-BIT
15.4 UltraSharp Widescreen WUXGA
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M
4GB DDR2-800 SDRAM (2x2048)
Internal Backlit Keyboard
Integrated Webcam with digital microphone
160GB Hard Drive, 7200RPM with Free Fall Sensor
8X DVD+/-RW
Intel WiFi Link 5300 802.11a/g/n Draft Mini Card
Dell Wireless® 370 Bluetooth 2.1
Internal 56K Modem
FIPS Certified Fingerprint Reader
6 Cell Battery

 

Currently I am running a fairly stable E6500 with Windows Server 2008, joined to my domain, Im running the Hyper-V role as well with an XP machine built. I have all the drivers loaded I believe except for the USH Broadcom and the Base system drivers, plus there maybe a few that the hard ware isn't detecting.

I have loaded the latest Dell Control POint for 64bit vista and its working so far, network card is using the Intel drivers. The dell control point drivers do not seem to see the Intel drivers, so when I open it I get the no network connection shown at this point, but its running fine, I have left it on in the lab with VM machine running as well for a week at a time with no reboots.

My question is does anyone know what the USH Base drivers are for? Someone said on another forum that USH were for the fingerprint scanner, but I don't have one.

Also I been thinking of downgrading to XP 64bit or Vista, I could run Virtual PC and still do most of what I want to do with VM's in test environment, thought it would be cool to run Hyper-V as we use a lot of VM's on the network but we use Vmware now. At least with Vista or XP 64bit I could down load all the correct drivers.

Any feedback would be great.

My setup is this:
Intel Core 2 Duo P9600 2.8
Windows 2008 with Hyper V 64-BIT
15.4 UltraSharp Widescreen WUXGA
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M
4GB DDR2-800 SDRAM 1 Dim**Waiting for price to drop to get another 4gig
Internal Backlit Keyboard
160GB Hard Drive, 7200RPM with Free Fall Sensor
8X DVD+/-RW
Intel WiFi Link 5300 802.11a/g/n Draft Mini Card
5530 Mobile Broadband
Dell Wireless® 370 Bluetooth 2.1
Internal 56K Modem
9 Cell Battery
All drivers are Dell Vista 64bit except for Intel Nic
Bios is A11
Dell OCP is the latest

*upgrades will be ram and hard drive caddy to go where the dvd is, I had one on my 800 and 820 and they are great to have.

It think thats is pretty much. 2gig of ram is cheap from Crucial, I may have to go that route its under 70$, but the 4 gig dim is still like $350, so I may have to live with 6gig.
Thanks, All.

 

Intel Matrix Storage Manager 8.8 gave me -

 

Both of you with the impressively low and green DPC latency seem to have the Intel Wifi 5300 card in common.

 

Well, I have the Wifi 5300 card. This is with the 8.8 matrix storage drivers installed...and this is a good day! Time to reinstall Vista I guess?

 

Well a reinstall is probably overkill. I'm by no means an expert on this but I've just been trying the standard disabling/enabling devices in device manager while monitoring the DPC latency to see what the culprits are. When you've exhausted that then you can try disabling things in the bios too before going for a reinstall.

I have the dreaded Dell 1397 wifi card of doom instead of the preferred Intel cards but after much trial and error with various drivers I've managed to get all green bars on my E6500. Now that I have the green bars I'll need to figure out exactly the minimal steps required to duplicate this. Here's my screenshot after leaving the computer idle for about 3 minutes on Windows 7 Beta. Before this, with the default Dell Vista install I got a big red spike every 1.5 minutes.

Audio and video is now smooth as butter and stutter/crackle free!

 

Hows the fan noise & on/off switching with the E6500 + NVidia 160M?
Thx; trying to determine if the 160M runs (at least) *almost* as cool as the Intel 4500HD GPU.
Fan noise really bugs me lol.

 

I have had two E6500s: one with the NVidia 160M and one with the Intel GPU. Specs identical apart from that (and a different hard disk) and the same BIOS version. The one with the NVidia GPU was MUCH noisier. The fan regularly came on and stayed on for half an hour even with virtually no load. I couldn't live with that beast and returned it.

I'm quite happy with the one I have now. Running with lid closed in the dock the fan starts at low speed now and then when something a bit demanding is going on (like streaming audio or video). The fan do stay on for quite some time when it starts. If I get tired of it I press ScrollLock+Z and it stops if the temperatures are below the thresholds.

 

Nyctalus - thx for that update.
When did you return the E6500 with the 160M & exchange it for the Intel 4500HD GPU?
Lastly - whats the TDP of the NV160m?

 

Notebookcheck gives the TDP as 12W. That isn't a big amount of power but, as I've said elsewhere, computer manufacturers are trying to keep the nVidia GPUs cool in case the problem with packaging deterioration resulting from thermal cycling occurs. It is unclear if that problem, which afflicts last year's nVidia GPUs, has been fixed. Even if it has in recent production, the BIOS may not know the difference between a 2008 NVS160M and a 2009 NVS160M.

John