Dell Latitude E6400

The Dell Latitude E6400 Replaced by: Dell Latitude E6430

This 14" Dell Latitude e6400 has an 80 GB hard drive, 2 GB RAM, an Intel core 2 Duo processor and 2.41 gHz processor speed. Mine was shipped to me in 2009 with the 64-bit Windows Vista Business edition. Dell does not provide support for Windows 7, 8, 8.1 or 10, but it works well  and is very fast on Windows 10 and is also very good with Windows 8.1. This is a tough little laptop and is very common. It can be purchased for a low price from nearly any hardware vendor.

[NOTE]: Dell no longer sells this laptop directly and they recommend the Dell Latitude (E6430) premier instead.These newer latitudes are about $1,000 each. Mine was $250 from a prominent re-seller.

Since this laptop was built before the introduction of the newer/faster UEFI BIOS versions, it requires a little bit of thought and preparation before installing WARP 3, 4 or WARP Server for ebusiness. I was not able to install OS/2 version 2.1.

For the A15 BIOS, Dell used a variety of security and boot-checking options that together are very similar to the functionality of our current UEFI computers. Most of these need to be adjusted or disabled to enable a non-UEFI operating system like warp 4 to boot normally. These security options are spread across the security, boot sequence, performance and :system management sections of the setup screens

I adjusted the following security features to enable OS/2 to load its install sequence:

Under Security: Disabled fast boot and instead chose "thorough" under boot checking Disabled password checking during boot Disabled Intel speedstep disabled camera disabled Fn key support disabled lighted keyboard

At this point, I inserted the eCS 2.2 beta II DVD and booted from the DVD drive. eCS Installation volume manager did not recognize my NTFS main partition or my Windows journal partition. I used the FreeDOS 1.1 FDISK utility to wipe the drive of the non-DOS partitions. I enabled FAT32 large disk support and created one huge 80 GB partition. I exited Fdisk and rebooted the laptop with the eCS 2.2 DVD in the drive. This time, LVM had no problem identifying my disk and created a new MBR. After another reboot the installation started again and the LVM was able to work with my hard drive. I used simple install to see where it would take me. I recommend using advanced install method so that system files can be in one partition while user data is located on another partition.

eCS automatically loaded ACPI support for the Intel core 2 Duo so multiprocessor support was not a problem.

For disk preparation, I chose to format the drive using JFS w. After 1 hour and 16 minutes of disk checking, the installer began to format hard drive with JFS. After that, the installation was fairly straightforward and problem-free. my IDT Integrated Audio Sound card was automatically detected and the UNIAUD driver was installed. I chose Generic VGA for my monitor type rather than use the suggested Scitech driver. Afterwards, I installed the Panorama driver. I skipped network configuration for the time being.

After the first reboot, the installer automatically suggested the Panorama video driver. I was able to increase the display resolution and set up the "eCS desktop" wallpaper. For wireless networking, I am using the "Iogear universal wireless-n adapter" (GWU627). It needs to use a static IP address (192.168.1.252) before being connected with an existing network.

I suppose it has to do with the age of the machine and the battery itself.

Battery life (with windows 7, 8.x and 10) varied a bit depending on whether I was using multimedia or other cpu-intensive stuff. I wouldn't use battery as a selling point of this laptop. For windows 10, the battery would last about 5-6 hours during normal usage and about 4 hours when viewing movies or online streaming content (like youtube).

I feel that my testing facility is not ideal. I have owned this laptop for almost four years and it is still using its original battery and AC adapter. I will post Sysbench results as soon as I can get a good sample.

I have to go to work today, but will post my test data when I get home. :)

Here is the text output of "Run all tests" in Sysbench 0.9  Sysbench

Sysbench (0.9.1d) results: (I attached the easier-to-read html below):

Quote PM-Graphics-marks:  15.2 CPU integer-marks:   88 CPU floating point-marks:  405 DIVE-marks:  1075 File I/O-marks:  253 Memory-marks:  7275 Simultaneous I/O-marks:  149 Disk I/O-marks  : 253

And here is the output from PCI /s (v. 2.2) Quote PCI Dump 15 Apr 2016 09:21:02 lspci version 2.2.3 ...

Quote 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2940 (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0 Bus: primary=00, secondary=0b, subordinate=0b, sec-latency=0 Capabilities: [40] Express Root Port (Slot+) IRQ 0 Capabilities: [80] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 ... Quote 00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 10f5 (rev 03) Subsystem: Dell Unknown device 0233 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 22 Memory at f6ae0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) Memory at f6adb000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) I/O ports at efe0 Capabilities: [c8] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [d0] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable- Capabilities: [e0] #13 [0306] ... Quote 00:03.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2a44 (rev 07) Subsystem: Dell Unknown device 0233 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16 Memory at f6ad9ef0 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3 Capabilities: [8c] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-

The Latitude e6400 (and the Dell Latitude E-series in general) have two means of connecting to the web or a local network:

Wireless Connection:

The E-series Latitudes feature the popular Intel 5100 wireless adapter. Intel calls it the "Intel® Ultimate N WiFi Link 5300 and Intel® WiFi Link 5100". In my experience, It is very reliable and works out-of-the-box on many Windows and GNU/Linux setups.

Ethernet adapter:

The second option for connecting the e6400 to a network is an ethernet port located on the back of the machine close to the battery compartment. Again, Dell uses an Intel product. This time it is the Intel® 82579 Gigabit Ethernet PHY also known as the Intel 82579 LM

The eCS 2.2 installer recognizes the ethernet adapter as an Intel ethernet Adapter and installs the Intel PRO/1000 device driver. Unfortunately, the Intel PRO/1000 driver does not specifically support the 82579LM.

The OS/2 driver was derived from the source code of the linux e1000e driver.

Intel Support Home seems to corroborate this

Intel Support Home recommends their OS-independent e1000e driver for this particular device (the 82579LM).

The source RPM for the e1000e for CentOS/ Redhat EL 6 is available at the pbone repository

NOTE: pbone repository requires you to register before downloading packages.