Sorry but I hate Dell laptops.

The business laptops that I have worked with over the years all had issues that were just a nightmare to deal with. That it is the wireless chipset that would get the laptop to crash because we were using Fortinet software to the latest bluetooth adventures.

I have been trying to get my apple wireless keyboard and trackpad to work with the work provided Latitude E6410 to no avail. I have read one site after another about the apple drivers that you need to extract from the boot camp material and how people resolved different issues. I have tried many times over the months and nothing ever worked. Different version of the drivers or different sequence of installation of the components.

Today, I decided that I did not trust the built-in bluetooth because other people at work were having issues with bluetooth headsets.

I disabled the bluetooth in the bios and plugged in my $5 tiny dongle I purchased months ago over the Internet. Very generic bluetooth dongle.

Tadam! Everything works now. I am using my keyboard and trackpad to post this.

All these months wasted on the below standard components that are in these Dell laptops. I am not surprised and I have one more reason to hate this Dell hardware. How can they sell so many with all these issues?

BladeBoot seems to be all that I am doing this month. It is an IBM technology to use the builtin NICs in a blade to iSCSI boot from SAN. A little bit of firmware update, a java app to configure the NVRam of the NIC (you can also do it with DHCP) and you need a SAN with iSCSI. IBM has good documentation on how to do it with Windows and with Suse Linux. The only glitch we had to fight with was that the MS iSCSI software initiator that support boot to SAN was not available at the link advertise. I found it by “mistake” at the EmBoot site. I downloaded the WinBoot/i software and it is part of it. On the Suse installation we are waiting for the SLES 10.0 sp1 to address the need for a DHCP server. As with many technology it looks much better on paper than in reality but we have a good start now.