I was reinstalling Windows XP on a Dell Latitude E4200. I installed the drivers in the correct order but was still left with a yellow caution in the Device manager for “audio device on high definition audio bus”.

I found lots of solutions on the internet about various Microsoft hotfixes like kb888111 and kb835221 neither of which made any difference.

The solution which may also work for any modern Latitude E series with Intel Video is as follows.

In my case the “audio device on high definition audio bus” was really Intel HDMI audio and the drivers for this can be found in the same folder as the video drivers that you can download from Dell.

To update the driver  just go to the yellow caution and choose update driver and point it to the HDMI folder of the intel video driver (as pictured below).

I could not find this documented anywhere so I hope it helps.

It gets 4 out of 5.

The E6400 is probably the most popular choice for your average business user and is a direct replacement for the old Latitude D620/D630 range.

My only aversion to the 14.1 inch model is the size I like small computers. That aside the E6400 would be ideal.

Link: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2333831,00.asp

I have recently been having a nightmare ordering a Latitude E4200 from Dell. So I did some sleuthing around the Dell.co.uk website this morning at 10am 22nd October 2008 to see if any other models were also being delayed.

In my case the 1.4 Ghz CPU on the Latitude E4200 is apparently causing the delay of up to 35 days.

As you can see above this isn’t just isolated to one machine or product family. Hopefully this will resolve itself soon as this represents a significant percentage of Dell’s Business offerings and must be forcing consumers to consider other options.

It can be difficult to disseminate what the difference is between these two types of storage  technologies available on Dell Laptops.

Both the 32GB and 64GB are available as “Ultra Performance”

While the Larger 128gb is described as “Dell Mobility Solid State Drive”

So what is the difference between the two types?

Over on the Direct 2 Dell Blog they claim this about the Ultra Performance model.

“Our labs benchmarked this drive in a Latitude notebook and saw a 35 percent overall system performance increase over a standard 2.5-inch 5400rpm notebook hard drive using SYSmark ‘07.  That’s even more impressive when you realize that the difference between standard 5400 rpm and performance 7200rpm drives (in the same generation) is 10 percent on average.  And just for fun, we did a shootout between the new SSD and a few desktop drives and, well, let’s just say that the performance gap is becoming a thing of the past.  Preliminary tests showed that this drive outperformed a 10,000 RPM desktop drive in overall system performance!”

Link: Direct 2 Dell SSD

So it seems the larger capacity but less expensive 128gb drive is based on the slightly slower technology.  I could do with some definitive confirmation of this – please use the comments.

It’s a Size Thing

So why not save some money and get the 32gb and utilise other external storage?

That’s all well in good and may be “do-able” for an average user but over the life of the machine I want some future proofing. No one knows for example the footprint size of Windows 7.

This choice between performance and capacity is a hard one for the consumer.

If you have any links or additional information on this topic please use the comments.

Dell have announced on their Direct2Dell blog they will be offering extended warranties for those customers affected by Nvidia GPU issues.

I have previously written about these issues here and here.

From their Post

“Dell will offer a 12-month limited warranty enhancement specific to this issue. For all customers worldwide, we plan to add 12 months of coverage for this issue to the existing limited warranty up to 60 months from the date of purchase.”

The affected Dell models are the:-

Dell Inspiron 1420

Dell Vostro Notebook 1310
Dell Vostro Notebook 1400
Dell Vostro Notebook 1510
Dell Vostro Notebook 1710

Dell Precision M2300

Dell Latitude D630
Dell Latitude D630c

Dell XPS M1330
Dell XPS M1530

Considering Nvida caused this problem Dell are taking a lot of heat for it. So are HP and the other OEMs.

Reading the comments on the current announcement this is still not considered a satisfactory solution by the majority of users. A product recall/replacement is.

Link: Direct2Dell (Comments)

Another Interesting Link on this topic: Link