E6410 Owner's Thread

[c14rider]

Just ordered a 6410 from the outlet. Yea! The 15% coupon got me hooked. Found an i7, WXGA+, 4GB, Webcam unit for $679 before the coupon. Not too shabby! The only thing it doesn't have that I want is the backlit keyboard. Anyone know if a 6400 keyboard fits? There is a ton of them on eBay for $20 each, but no mention of fitting the 6410. I have a 6400 now, so I guess I can figure it out myself once it gets here

[Dillio187]

yes, the 6400 keyboard fits. Enjoy

[Paul P]

When the OS does not have the device driver for a critical install device like the storage controller, you can use the 'load driver' option at the beginning of the OS installation to load the desired driver from your media so that it is immediately available and used during the OS installation. ...

Thanks GK for your in depth reply. I was not aware of this and I guess I
just skipped over the option when installing the OS. I agree that if you're
going for clean, you might as well go as clean as possible. I've just about
finished setting everything up on my machine but I'll remember this for next
time 'round.

Note that the Dell image guide advises installing the DCP security drivers even if you do not install the DCP security manager... but I ordered none of the security options on my E6410... no readers, TPM disabled in BIOS, no vPro, not using AMT... so I do not see any problem with omittng the drivers and disabling the Broadcom USH... has not been a problem on my E6400.

Same here. The only thing I had no choice about was the smartcard reader
but at least it's not complaining about being ignored.

Paul P

[Paul P]

Oh noes! 19MB out of 4096MB of RAM, what will you ever do!?!

You gotta admit that a 20mb executable that just handles a few character
sequences is the very definition of bloat. I wouldn't install it just on principle.
I haven't noticed any function keys that don't work, though I don't think I've
tried them all.

Speaking of bloat, I was going to install Adobe Reader on my machine so I
could read pdf's but almost fainted when I saw it was 350 mb . I hunted
around and downloaded PDF Xchange Viewer instead. 6mb, and it does more !

Paul P

[GKDesigns]

Speaking of bloat, I was going to install Adobe Reader on my machine so I
could read pdf's but almost fainted when I saw it was 350 mb .

Adobe.com states 40.99MB next to the Reader download?

GK

[freeman]

Normally, I use Foxit Reader, little over 6MB installer also. I wonder which is better Foxit or Xchange.
BTW, just out of curiosity, if you order from Dell outlet how do you know if you get the PCMCIA or ExpressCard model?

[Paul P]

Adobe.com states 40.99MB next to the Reader download?

Weird, I must have been dreaming. I wonder what it was I did see, since I
subsequently went to the trouble of finding and downloading something else.
I've been going through a lot of applications lately setting up my E6410...

[Jakeworld]

I made an observation yesterday while playing a game and using vertical sync. If you use the Extended Battery Life profile, be sure to look at the advanced options under Dell Enhanced Settings -> Refresh Rate. If this option is set to minimum while you use the computer on battery, the power management system will drop the refresh rate to 40Hz; however, it will not revert the refresh rate to 60Hz once the power supply is reconnected. The reason for this is that for "plugged in", the refresh rate option is set to OS Controlled, and thus will not update after reconnecting the power supply. If a game's minimum playback requirement is greater than 40 fps and you have vertical sync enabled, you may notice some strange speed issues, as vertical sync will lock the fps to the monitor's refresh rate.

Therefore, you will need to reset the monitor to 60Hz manually, and you need to change the Refresh Rate settings to OS Controlled for the battery setting in the power profile as well. I am unsure if anyone else has experienced this issue, but it was driving me to reinstall the display drivers until I finally realized that vertical sync (at least in the game I was using) was tied to the monitor refresh rate. So after that "Eureka" moment, and changing the settings back to 60Hz, the game played smooth as silk.

Dell really should have included an option for Maximum as a value for the refresh rate, instead of just OS Controlled, which appears to merely maintain the status quo, and not revert the refresh rate back to a more reasonable value. Also note that this issue occurred with the NVIDIA 3100m, and I have no idea if this also applies to Intel x3100 users.

[idunno]

this is probably a stupid question, but i haven't had any luck searching for info...

the dell site shows 2 downloads for bluetooth:

DW375 Bluetooth - Windows Vista and Windows 7 Combined Driver and Application Installer (MUP) - NIC_DRVR_WIN_R254689.EXE

DW375 Bluetooth - Windows Vista and Windows 7 Combined Driver and Application Installer (Customer Installer) - R254688.EXE

the (MUP) one is labelled as a driver, and the (Customer Installer) one is labelled as an application. Do I need to install both, or are they essentially the same thing? If both, I assume the (MUP) one goes first?

[Jakeworld]

this is probably a stupid question, but i haven't had any luck searching for info...

the dell site shows 2 downloads for bluetooth:

DW375 Bluetooth - Windows Vista and Windows 7 Combined Driver and Application Installer (MUP) - NIC_DRVR_WIN_R254689.EXE

DW375 Bluetooth - Windows Vista and Windows 7 Combined Driver and Application Installer (Customer Installer) - R254688.EXE

the (MUP) one is labelled as a driver, and the (Customer Installer) one is labelled as an application. Do I need to install both, or are they essentially the same thing? If both, I assume the (MUP) one goes first?

When I installed all of the system drivers for the E6410, I discovered that each package is identified by Dell as the same installation. I ended up using only the package labelled as a driver, since when I tried the alternate package, it queried whether I would like to reinstall, modify, or uninstall the previous Bluetooth package installation. I personally would just use the newer file, but as far as I could tell, they are the same.