Latitude E6510 Owner's Lounge

Check a few things:

1) Is your power setting set on High Power? If so, try setting it to Balanced. Note that with this plan there are quite a few low-level optimizations in Win7 that get switched on beyond just the user-adjustable menu tree of settings.

2) Run task manager and sort by % CPU Time. If your power plan wasn't set to High Power, odds are you have/had something running that was chewing up CPU (Flash ads running in a browser, some badly written system tray agent, etc).

 

Latitude ON

Can anyone point to instructions on how to configure the Latitude ON functionality. I am not connected to an Exchange server and it is unclear if this is a requirement.

When I boot with the ON key it says go to Windows and use the Reader 2.0 software. What is this?

 

Do you have the full Latitude On hardware? This is an optional module with an ARM CPU which fits into one of the mini-PCIe slots. If you don't have this module then you will get directed to the Reader software.

John

 

From Notebookcheck.net's review:

I thought the additional batteries for the E6xxx family were battery slices that went UNDER the laptop?

 

Pretty sure they're mistaken about the UltraBay batteries, I've never seen one for the E-series and I don't even think it would work because of the ports in there.

 

Hi guys! I've just ordered an E6510 with i7-620M and NVIDIA NVS 3100M. Is it possible to replace the thermal grease (with Arctic or similar) on these, or do they use thermal pads or something that cannot be replaced easily?

 

^--- Typically you can easily replace the thermal compound on the CPU, if you have a NVIDIA GPU, you should be able to apply a thermal compound to this too. During the Core 2 Duo days, the chipset had a thermal pad, I don't think the E6410/6510 have one, but maybe someone with more experience can chime in.

 

Regarding E6510's that have one of the i5 or dual core i7 processors, AND the Nvdia graphics card, is it possible to configure the machine to switch off the Nvidia card and just use the Intel HD graphics when running on just the battery?

A feature of the Intel HD graphics is it can supposedly switch off and enable an external GPU on the fly. I haven't seen any indication so far that Dell supports this. I would love to have the Nvidia GPU when I'm docked and running a second display, but save the battery when I'm mobile.

 

No. If you have the Nvidia solution, the Intel GPU is already switch off (no power). Also the GPU have it's own power management system. It downclocks to minimum speed possible to consume much less power. Assuming you can, you should expect only a ~30min (estimation) battery life increase.

That is actually an Nvidia and ATi hacking trick to go around Intel GPU, and a special Intel/Nvidia (or Ati for Ati graphic card), special agreement drivers between both company.
And it looks like this:
YouTube - Nvidia Optimus Technology Side by Side

Nvidia Optimus is an alternative method to switchable graphic, using a different kind of hacking technique, where basically the GPU spies on the Intel GPU and grabs all it's processing instructions it needs to do, do them, and output them back to the Intel GPU... the Intel GPU notice that the task is already done, and outputs the image to your monitor.
This solution is great, but has a different downside: Because the Intel GPU doesn't have dedicated memory, it uses your system RAM. The only way to access your RAM (main memory), is use teh Bus, like the CPU. Only 1 device can use the bus at a time (usually your CPU), having the Intel GPU slows the CPU communication between itself and the memory. Now, add to this the Nvidia GPU... this stresses the BUS too much resulting in a visible CPU performance degradation. Nothing major, and few games will be affected, but it's still there, and will alter benchmark scores. This can be compensated by a faster CPU, and faster RAM though, but expect to pay more for your laptop.

Apple technology is similar to Nvidia solution, but doesn't have any software list or real software monitoring system. It looks at OpenGL calls. So if you play a video on your web browser (let's say), the Nvidia GPU will kick in. When your video is finished, and left the page entirely, one would expect (and so does Nvidia Optimus), that it will return to the Intel GPU, but no, it does not. You have to close the web browser, for this to happen. So if you forget to do this, you will notice that your laptop is warm, and low in battery quickly.

 

Can anyone please confirm if TPM 1.2 is standard configuration? I mean all E6410/E6510 have TPM chip no matter what?

I can't see it as an option when I configure E6410/E6510 in Dell website, unlike before when I configured my E6400.