ha! found some new things to try on the latitude:

problems: laptop makes a high-pitched, drizzling noise and high i/o (disk/mem) causes the computer to freeze (hard reset necessary)
solution: set the bios POST to ‘thorough’ (default=’fast’), add the grub options ‘pci=bios idle=halt’ to menu.lst
…
“Note: on newer laptops with ATA drives, if you experience random, non-reproducible, complete system freezes (i.e., mouse and keyboard are frozen; cannot ssh into the machine, must press the power button to reboot), and these freezes leave no messages in /var/log/messages or /var/log/Xorg.0.log, you may want to try always leaving a disk in your CD or DVD drive. This has been known to cure the problem in at least two systems (Inspiron 9300 and Precision M70).”
[here]

i have had the d620 lockup on me, with the caps-lock and scroll-lock indicators blinking in sync. i did find some documentation @ dell that tells you what the system flash codes are, but the caps+scroll lock flashing isn’t listed.

the high i/o = lockup might definantly explain some of the issues i’ve had with vmware, evolution, and pidgin. as silly as it sounds having to put a disc in the drive tray… i guess i’ll try it also and see what happens. i wonder if the system would be just as happy by replacing the optical drive with a second battery.

random lockups aside, the latitude is slowly coming together…. atleast compiz stopped being such a pita.

*update* grumble… grumble… the laptop locked up probably about a 1/2 hour after i made these changes. i’m fairly positive that it froze when i accidently hit the numlock. i had also hot undocked the laptop so i’m gonna guess it wasn’t happy about that also. booo.