Latitude E6510 Owner's Lounge

That's great news - mine is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow.

Regarding the antivirus, try Security Essentials if you haven't already. It's free antivirus/malware protection from Microsoft. It's hard to beat free! http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

 

did you actually paid 180$ for a 500GB hd?

 

Does anyone know the actual weight of the e6510 yet to confirm dell's specifications. Also i'm interested in the battery life of the 9 cell or even the 6 cell battery. They claim 9 hours for the 9 cell and i don't believe it. Thanks!

 

Battery life depends what you do with your system, and your configuration.. faster CPU consumes more power, so you lose battery life, more internal hardware has the same effect (blue-tooth card, wireless, WAN, and so on).

The battery life should be close to the E6500.

I have the E6400 they claimed 9 hours, and I got almost 9 hours idle (well typing text in word, minimum screen brightness, wireless ON, speakers muted, Dell Extended battery life ON (but Aero enabled), under Vista 64-bit), others more as they picked the Intel GPU instead of the Nvidia solution. That is of course with the 9-cell battery. SDD's you can expect a little more but not much (as the SSD goes full on, or off when accessing data on it).

Now your laptop is larger (bigger screen), so I guess less power, especially that it uses the same battery. Maybe 8hours and half. BUT I do see a 90Whr 9-cell battery, so with that one, it should compensate and you should have around 9-hours.

Of course that amount of battery life will diminish fairly quickly like any other battery, where after a year and half, expect about 2 hours of battery life.

Something of interest:
- Background application like IM's consumes battery as the wireless card needs to be connected constantly.
- Aero Basic or Classic skin, can lower your battery life with you have the Nvidia solution, as Aero is easy to draw for the GPU, so it doesn't need to clock at higher speed when you move a window. Maybe have the transparency level set to OFF when on battery (Windows 7 takes care of that when you go under power saver mode). The reason for this is that Aero sues the GPU to draw, while Aero Basic, Class, XP and older Windows, uses the CPU to draw. As CPU's totally suck at drawing (see Flash as an example), your CPU struggles more requiring to clock faster when you move a windows and stuff, so you reduce battery life. Of course that really depends on the GPU you pick. Some Nvidia/ATI GPU are less powerful, and requires to go full speed to draw and that is bad.
- 64-bit Windows also improves battery life, as the power consumption is teh same as a 32-bit application/OS to run, but it requires less instruction, so you can save a few minutes here and there, and anything that could help, helps. I for one, noticed that playing video's under 64-bit codecs using Windows Media Player 11/12 64-bit, did show a nice increase in battery life compared to when I used 32-bit Windows Media Player 11/12 with 32-bit codecs. How much? I can't say numbers, as it depends on the codec and video format, and video compression. Of cousre I am not talking about hours here, only minutes.. but again anything helps, helps.

 

I'm interested in the E6510. If you order the NVIDIA Quardo GPU, can you switch back to the internal Intel GPU?

 

why would you deactivate Nvidia graphic card ?

 

As far as I know, you cannot switch between the GPUs.

John

 

One of the biggest laptop features that's been talked about in the past 6 months is "switchable graphics". It allows you to only use the high-power GPU when you need it, and switch to the lower-powered one when you don't. This helps to save battery life.

 

for sure... however you could not switch on this model... not quite sure you could switch on any model...

 

Actually this is the problem...
YouTube - Nvidia Optimus Technology in Action

It is true that people don't really switch their GPU on a switable graphic laptop, as it's too tedious. And you end up doing a lot o switching.

So you need Nvidia Optmus, actually or Apple technology. The problem with Apple, is you can't control the list. Review sites noticed that when you play a video on your web browser, the dedicated GPU quick's in, once done.. it doesn't come back the other integrated one, and just kills your battery. They are a lot more flaws on Apple technology which you can read about on reviews site.

Nvidia Optimus has a downside as well... as when the GPU is activated, it actually dumb everything in the frame buffer of the Intel GPU, so that Intel GPU thinks that it's task is done and just out the image. Great little hack. However, it cost something... bus. When the bus is used, no one can use it until the bus is done (their is a system put in place in our computers to manage the bus, so that everyone get's it.. but adding this bus heavy trick, causes a system slow down). But how about having a dedicated bus, why not do that? Well we wish. having to manage 2 bus instead of one, is extremely complicated as you have to protect overrides. What if bus one wants to write something in memory at address 500, while bus to does the exact same thing as they both see the address 500 as free, as they both requested it at exactly the same time... what do you do know? so it gets complicated. Remember that computers are stupid, for us it's trivial... programming this is difficult. You might need a computer of it's own JUST to manage this. Do you want to buy 2 computers for 1 computer? I don't think so. This was just one example of a possible problem.


Also, Nvidia Optimus has another problem, yes it doesn't have any of Apple solution problems. But, what if you open photoshop just to view a picture, do you need a dedicated GPU? No.. and that hurts battery life.

The current technology is that the GPU changes speed based on it's needs. but sometimes it increase speed, consuming more power, when you don't want this. However, you don't have the problems mentioned above form Apple and Nvidia technique.