New Latitude 5470

The parts you need are 80RK8 cable and 4JMFP bracket - that is according to Dell support. The cost was approx £50 inc vat

I could not find them anywhere else, but I did find http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/121996952126 for £15 - which looks similar to the 80RK8 cable - but I have not ordered it yet as I won't have time at present to mess about testing it etc. If you do decide to risk ordering the Ebay cable, I would appreciate if you feedback here on how you get on with it.

I was not planning to try and source the bracket - as I was planning to try out an existing SSD I have. But I suppose if you are going to use a HDD then you will need to secure it firmly? Although it does look a tight fit in there - so not sure if they would be much room for movement....

EDIT: I asked on the official dell forum and a regular poster suggested that the E7440 cable (sold on Ebay) was interchangeable with the E5470 cable......

 

Quite niche: NixOS.

The touchpad is detected as a plain PS/2 mouse rather than an Alps touchpad, so basic functions work, I can move the cursor around and even two-finger scroll, but e.g. horizontal scrolling doesn't work, I can't tap-to-click (EDIT: actually this does seem to work, it was just finicky?), scrolling with the trackpoint doesn't work, and there are no touchpad configuration options available in the system settings (logically enough). When I googled around for information, I saw some patches to add support floating around the kernel mailings lists, but it seems they haven't been merged yet (I'm using 4.7 right now), so hopefully they'll get into one of the next releases. And I can live with this until then.

The GPU situation is much weirder. Everything worked fine at first, but ever since I upgraded the BIOS from 1.5 to 1.8 (or 1.05 to 1.08.03 - I'm not sure why there's two different formats), if I try to enable KDE's desktop effects, the window manager crashes. (I tried to downgrade the BIOS but it wasn't allowed.) Now I have no idea how or why a BIOS upgrade could have this result, maybe some kind of firmware thing? And as far as I can tell OpenGL acceleration does seem to work, it's using the Intel drivers and not VESA or something (and I just tried launching Quake 3 to make sure, which seemed to work), it's specifically the desktop effects that have stopped working for some reason. But this is also not really critical functionality, so I'm just hoping it'll get fixed at some point...

 

i'm keeping my BIOS version (1.4.7 A07), had more luck with the bleeding edge drm-intel-next kernel on ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

no issues with my dual pointing keyboard+touchpad+pointingstick

 

Many thanks! 50GBP is really not a negligible sum for minor parts like these... at least the E7440 cable seems to be available for much more reasonable prices on ebay. I wonder if there's any chance that the bracket is also compatible with some different Latitude models? (E5450 and E7470 being its closest relatives...)

 

Poster on the Dell forum said the bracket was not exchangeable... only the cable...

 

I accidentally (though maybe not surprisingly) found that same thread when googling for the part numbers you gave - and as far as I can tell they're just saying that it's not interchangeable with the E7440 bracket, not that it's not interchangeable with any other models, though it's a bit ambiguous.

 

Gotcha. Yeah, can't help there. I'm on Gentoo although I tried out Fedora 24 on the very similar M5510 GPU hardware and I've got several coworkers running Ubuntu 16.04 on the M5510 (regular release, not Dell's.) (The touchpad is completely different on the M5510.)

I can test that when I get home; I've never taken to mouse gestures so I wouldn't notice them being missing.

One thought would be that it may actually be a matter of the Xorg driver version rather than the Kernel one. I'm also on 4.7, although I started on 4.6 and haven't noticed any difference.

I've had a lot of problems with KDE desktop effects on Intel GPUs going back quite a few versions; I just use the XRender backend, which doesn't have as much eye candy. Also, on Gentoo disabling GLES2 seemed to help quite a bit with other applications, although that's not going to be an option.

Currently am running x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-2.99.917_p20160803 which is pretty much bleeding edge for the GPU driver.

 

My sister's old Latitude kicked the bucket. With her working from home half of the week and her birthday coming around the corner I managed to score an E5470 from the Dell Outlet for a great price (they had a 37% off coupon that day). Of course, the price was so good because it was a HDD, 4gb ram and the 768P panel. I took the SSD out of her dead Latitude, purchased another 4gb ram cheaply but what worried me the most was the 768P panel. My desktop has a 4k monitor and my mobile device is a Surface Book so my eyes were not ready for what they experienced. My sister doesn't like high DPI screens, hurts her eyes she says but I couldn't do that to her. She said 1080P was too high resolution on a 14" panel so I found an alternative.

I purchased a 1600x900 screen from here: http://www.laptopscreen.com/English/screen-part-number/N140FGE-EA2~REV.C3/

Took 10 minutes max to swap, mainly due to me being overly cautious removing the screen bezel. Worked out great, huge improvement. Doesn't look awful anymore but still not too high DPI for her.

I know just about everyone here wouldn't purchase this machine without the 1080P screen, but just placing for reference for anyone wanting to do the same. Fantastic upgrade for the price of a cheap 120gb SSD. Dell really should make this the default screen.

 

I am very pleased with mine so far, but there is one problem however.

Win 10 pro won't clean install with AHCI mode on. With RAID on as of defualt, I did manage to do a clean once but as soon as I switched to AHCI in the BIOS it does not work anymore.

The installer always gets stuck at sometimes 8 %, sometimes 49 % and sometimes it just hangs on the beginning of installation procedure.

With Ubuntu 16.04 there is no issues whatsoever.

Not that I need Windows, but I thought it's good to have for the firmware upgrade of the SSD and Microsofts integration of OneDrive with Office and other stuff is something that I made myself too comfortable with. But I can live without all that.

I just want to know what can be the problem.

Cheers, Vaayu

 

So, I bought one of these, couldn't resist the OTD price. Somehow I accidentally hit the NBD shipping, so I'll have to talk to Dell about getting that refunded. The specs are:

i7-6820HQ
8GB
500GB Hard Drive
1080 Matte IPS
Windows 10 Pro

My impressions so far are pretty good. It seems solid, though a bit heavier than my E7440. I don't need a a ton of mobility, so that's not a huge issue. The stick and keyboard are significantly better than the E7440, not ThinkPad good, but a good enough given the price.

My only real complaint so far is the fan seems to be set to a low audible drone from the fan that doesn't seem to turn off. Is there something I can do to fix it? I think that'll be a deal breaker if I can't fix it. I don't need a ton of power and my E7440 is very quiet.

I think I saw somewhere I can do the 80mm M.2 SSD with a 7mm drive? I'd like to do that with my 1TB WD. Thanks for any help.