Thinking of replacing M1530 with E6500

G'day all,

Depending on whether Dell can fix my M1530 with a motherboard replacement, I'm thinking of asking that they replace it with a Latitude E6500. My father has this machine, and he seems pretty happy with it (aside from a few random crashes due to the way the IT Tech at his company configured the poor thing - the OS is a real mess). Here are two things I'd like to know:

1) Are there any outstanding issues with the E6500 currently? Which is the preferred wireless card?
2) Does the Quadro video card have the same overheating issues as my 8600M in my M1530? I don't really game too much (all I'd be playing would be Half-Life based games) so I could get away with the X4500HD if I wanted to, but I'd prefer a dedicated graphics card (and I'd be having a screen which is 1920x1200).

So does that sound good? I'd obviously only be doing this if Dell could replace it for free OR it was a very small cost difference to me.

 

Aside from the typical teething problems found in a new line, I don't know of any really outstanding issues with the E6500. There do seem to be some cases of the NVS 160M overheating in the E6400, but the chassis of the E6500 is designed to dissipate heat from significantly higher-power graphics solutions (a la M4400), so the NVS 160M really shouldn't be stressing it much.

I'd still go with the IGP if you're not going to game. Saves a significant amount of battery life if that's important to you...

 

The E6500 with NVS seem's to have two separate heatpipe assy's for the cpu and GPU like the M4400 according to the picture's in the service manual,so you would think it would handle the extra heat generated by the 160M a lot better than the E6400 does,plus being a bit larger physically would help also.

I use the intel 5100 wireless card and don't have any problem with it,the 5300 is the more desirable one if your network support's the higher "n" speed's presumably.
I would suggest to anyone though that they don't use intel proset wireless software though,as it seem's it can be quite problematic as well as adding like 12 extra processes and an extra 30 second's to shut down.
I downloaded the "driver only" from intel's website and let the OS manage it when using window's.

Your taking a fair sort of a dive in graphic's power for gaming from the 1530,but I expect you already know this,and like you say most source stuff will run on pretty much anything,with concession's to setting's.

Good luck.

 

What about speaker's crackling and stuff? Wasn't that an issue at some point or was that the E6400?

 

I think that is substantially fixed by recent driver updates. The main culprits were the Intel matrix storage driver and the Dell (Broadcom) wireless. However, the E series audio is still underwhelming.

John