E6420 research thread

[becker666]

I have a dual boot Mavericks and Yosemite on an E6420, I'm sticking with Mavericks 10.9.5 the only issues I have is Sleep is flakey and very low volume on the headphones, almost all else is good

 

  I needed some screen recordings and tried to use QuickTime, it all goes as it should until I stop the recording, it freezes up the whole machine. After rebooting I can save the recording but when trying to play it it freezes up.  My start switches are: -v -f GraphicsEnabler=No without the GraphicsEnabler the screen goes blank but it seems like that it came back to bite me now ;-(

 

  Is there a known tweak for this??? I needed to record a web meeting used my phone to do that but it'd be nice to have this working as this is my main machine these days

 

    Cheers

 

Edit:  It seems like there is(was?) an issue quick QuickTime and blowing up even in actual Macs, I kept playing with it and tried iShowU to capture it went fine when I tried to play it loaded to Quicktime and back to being froze, after rebooting I played the recording(mov) with VLC and it played fine. I played mp4, mpg with QT and it is fine. So it seems like the issue is QT playing mov files or maybe some mov files I don't have other mov files to check on this, the captured mov file before playing in QT shows up as negative video hitting play and the whole machine is gone, the mouse moves but nothing else responds.

[br0adband]

Ok, got most everything working on my E6420/i5-2540/8GB/etc, still working on Clover on the hard drive to boot (I'll live for now using the USB stick), but after doing some more research it appears our issue with the low volume through the headphone output isn't something that is going to be resolved at some point. I did the "trick" to put the laptop to sleep/wake it up but it made no difference on my particular E6420, perhaps I'll continue trying various things and maybe something will help.

 

I noticed even in Windows 7 using the stock Microsoft "high definition" audio driver or the actual Dell supplied driver (the Intel IDT one) always tended to be low but not this low as it is using El Capitan (not sure Mavericks or Yosemite would be any different at all, probably not) - but curiously under Linux (Mint, Ubuntu, etc) the volume can get rather excessively loud, even to the point of being able to totally blow out a pair of headphones I had a while back (was testing the volume and went just a wee bit too far, cracked the transducer in a set of Koss KSC-75 earclips).

 

So, it's always been an issue for me that the actual sound hardware in the E6400 I have as well as my current primary laptop, the E6420, is capable of some pretty serious output volume but the Windows drivers just don't allow for it.

 

Ah well, I'll survive, I've got audio and I'm ok with it, just wish it was louder like many others.

[wern]

Strange, i've seen a few posts with low volume on headphones.
For me the headphone volume was to loud, with this kext it should be loud enough, if not i can give you one with louder headphone volume.
You have to set your layout-id to 0, i'm afraid it becomes a new challenge, but it can be simply changed @dsdt

[hectorox]

Hello Guys,

 

Can anyone provide me a codecdump(from linux) from this device: Latitude E6420 without nvidia graphiccard with codec-device-id: device-id 0x111d76e7

 

I need it for further investigation. I would be very thankful!

 

Kind Regards,

[Jake Lo]

Here you go

codec_dump_E6420.txt

[hectorox]

Hi,
 
Do you have a working Layout.xml and Platforms.xml file (with all inputs and outputs working for Latitude E6420) for el capitan? If yes, can you provide them,too?

[Jake Lo]

Here

 

Look inside Resources. You'll need to uncompress them. 

[hectorox]

Here

 

Look inside Resources. You'll need to uncompress them. 

reading your layout.xml and platforms.xml I see you have no Dockingstation LineOut implemented. Is it because you could not get it to work?

[Jake Lo]

I didn't make this patch. It's done by telanx.

Can you improve on it?

[br0adband]

General question for anyone on an E6420:

 

I just did the update to 10.11.4 (on top of a clean 10.11.3 installation that had no issues at all that I could detect) and oddly since the update when I look at Wi-Fi networks using the Wi-Fi button on the menu bar I only see 3 networks listed - with 10.11.3 I'd see over 30 of them since I live in an apartment building in the downtown area (I can detect about 50 from my apartment alone). It's never showing me more than just 3 of them at any time, and there's another thing as well:

 

The Wi-Fi adapter is only working in 11n mode, it's not picking up anything on 11b/g at all - my apartment building offers Wi-Fi service (which I don't use) but their mesh network has no 11n support at this time. From my apartment I typically can see 7 of the APs on the mesh network - my iPhone here and my BlackBerry Z10 both show the other networks so it's not like they just up and disappeared.

 

Trying to figure out why this is currently happening after that 10.11.4 update I did a few hours ago. That's the only change in this system so far (working bare metal install with Clover v3368 (the latest version). I haven't changed anything else since the update in terms of anything that could be relevant - earlier today I was able to easily see all the Wi-Fi activity around me but now it's suddenly just vanished and it's only showing me 3 at a time off the menu bar button.

 

I did check the System Report for Wi-Fi and it's showing a lot more info as expected as well as about 30 11n networks but it's not showing the building Wi-Fi at all on 11b/g even though the report info obviously shows things working:

 

 

en1:
Card Type:
Firmware Version:
MAC Address:
Locale:
Country Code: Supported PHY Modes: Supported Channels:
Wake On Wireless:
AirDrop:
Status:
Current Network Information:
br0adband’s MacBook Pro 3/23/16, 9:53 AM
AirPort Extreme (0x168C, 0x200) Atheros 9280: 4.0.74.0-P2P 00:03:7f:92:aa:1c
Unknown
US
802.11 a/b/g/n
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 36, 40, 44, 48, 52, 56, 60, 64, 100, 104, 108, 112, 116, 120, 124, 128, 132, 136, 140, 149, 153, 157, 161, 165
Supported
Supported
Connected

 

 

Just curious to know if anyone else might be seeing this kind of behavior with 10.11.4 (if you've updated) or if it's probably just something on my particular E6420 that got itself borked during the update. And here's what the network pane shows:

 

 

Obviously there's something a bit weird going on. I'm going to install 10.11.3 again to a spare hard drive so I don't pooch what I've got working now and do some testing. I do know that booting into the Recovery HD and looking at the network access (upper right corner) shows me a bunch of them, but for whatever reason in 10.11.4 itself it's not so, kinda baffling me at the moment.