Ionising_Radiation

20 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

bottom panels

I'm very curious to see what they are going to do with the hinges. A return to full 180°+ hinges would be nice. 

10 hours ago, Rinconmike said:

the 7560 with RTX 3080

It's possible Dynamic Boost has been altogether switched off on the 7560, and Dell wants to maintain a strict 90 W maximum on the GPU.

20 hours ago, Rinconmike said:

Well, looks like 1.8.0 disappeared from the Dell Download page.  

If they pulled it, then they probably detected a show-stopping last minute bug. I'll just wait a couple more weeks to upgrade; I'm currently on 1.6 (I think). 

Not fond of Dell's recent firmware releases; they have been especially buggy.

5 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Oh, and there's the lack of dedicated Home/End and PgUp/PgDn keyboard buttons which I ended up solving for myself with some "creative" key remapping. 

What I ended up doing was to just disable Num Lock, and enable it when needed (I need Home and End more often than I need the numpad). With an external keyboard I keep it enabled, because I have a 100% keyboard. 

14 hours ago, Asleep said:

Oh no, that's a 100% deal-killer for me. I must have power and ethernet on the back of a laptop.

I'd say having ports on the back drastically reduces the surface area available for cooling, and in turn reduces the maximum potential performance for a given form factor. Without ports, designers can effectively have the motherboard stop halfway through the chassis and have the entire rear section dedicated to cooling and fans (which looks like what we're going to get, which is really nice). 

I already have cables sticking out of all three sides on my laptop (USB mouse and keyboard, USB-C charging cable, USB-C-to-3.5mm adaptor, power, Ethernet); for me, it's a net positive to reduce the number of sides cables are attached to. 

That said, I want to have my cake and eat it too: I don't like ports on the side (especially power, what a pain), and I would like both cables on the back and extra cooling. 

14 minutes ago, Rinconmike said:

Do you have RAID On or AHCI

AHCI. I have no use for hardware RAID; I don't think it affects hibernation. Like I said, Secure Boot was the issue.

15 minutes ago, Rinconmike said:

I read another post that AHCI could impact battery life.

I don't see how it could. The single biggest impact on battery life on these machines is the NVIDIA GPU. I can also get ~8 hours of battery life, both on Linux and Windows. 

6 minutes ago, Rinconmike said:

What bios are you on?  Could it be related to a bios issue?

1.16, I think. I have tried all versions, no changes. At least I have hibernate working now, which is much better than anything. 

7 hours ago, Mr. Fox said:

I haven't really done anything with laptops for quite a few years

Real bummer. I miss your passionate... comments on BGA 😛 I'm just glad you hung around. 

So, I thought I'd get cracking at my no-hibernation problem again. To recap, both sleep and hibernation weren't working on my 7560 in Windows 10; when I tried hibernating, the display would lock and switch off, but the keyboard lights, fans, and peripherals remained on. The notebook could be brought back with a swipe on the touch pad. Sleep and hibernate worked fine on Linux, so this was clearly a Windows-only problem. 

I tried executing `shutdown /h` from PowerShell, and of course, the same thing happened, but now the prompt returned `Element not found (1168).`

I ran a search, and came across a straightforward solution, the first one that actually worked: disable Secure Boot. 

I realise that this doesn't really compromise the security of my partitions even though unsigned bootloaders can be run, because all partitions on all drives are individually encrypted, except the EFI/boot partition on the Linux drive, that contains system-boot which launches both Windows and Linux. NTFS partitions are encrypted with BitLocker, and the Linux BTRFS subvolumes (/, /home, and /swap) are encrypted with LUKS. 

I think this happened because I reset the TPM and cleared the original keys, and replaced them with self-signed keys. Some might recall the little scare I had last August when I couldn't get display out from my notebook's internal display, which I had to fix by re-appending Microsoft's key to the Secure Boot key server thing. 

I still wish Dell had fully eked out all possible edge cases with their new UEFI firmware. It is still quite buggy and very slow—I much prefer the old raster text firmware. Modern firmware are entire operating systems with full JS runtimes, even. 

@Aaron44126, very interesting finds. 

The dimensions of the chassis covers do look like they're (finally) moving to 16:10 panels. Here's also hoping that they use 10-bit HDR high-refresh-rate non-PCM panels. 

On 2/24/2022 at 6:30 AM, Rinconmike said:

Looks like they pulled the 1.6.1 also

Interesting; I wonder why. Maybe Dell reps can comment, so we can rollback our machines if necessary. 

On 2/15/2022 at 4:32 AM, katalin_2003 said:

the XMP option was right there, in the BIOS menu, under Performance.

It currently runs at 3200Mhz

Make sure you run Memtest86. I had the same 3200 MHz memory with XMP and it led to random blue-screens and game crashes. Turns out the memory subsystem was horribly unstable. I had to disable XMP. 

2 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Really, it doesn't matter that much what it is called, it is meaningless now and just up to whatever Microsoft's marketing department decides.  Windows 11 is in many ways little more than a slightly larger than normal "feature update" for Windows 10 (...tied in with a system requirements hike).  Incidentally, the version number under the hood — that you see when you open the command prompt, or in a web browser user agent — is still 10.0 as well.

There are some parts of Windows that haven't seen a lick of change since Vista (many obscure context menus, ribbon menus, user folder directory APIs), or even XP/2000 (anything that relies on mmc.exe (Device Manager, Disk Management), many network adaptor IP address/DNS/masking settings, aka these windows below). 

2 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

I have considered a switch to Linux

Linux is honestly a lot more straightforward now, especially with newer laptops (presuming you want to get a 7770 soon). Optimus, once an extreme pain point, works automatically with Ampere and 11th-gen+ CPUs (there are two parts: putting the dGPU to idle when not in use, and PRIME offload/reverse PRIME offload, which allows one GPU to be a framebuffer source and the other to be a framebuffer sink: both are configured by the NVIDIA driver). I use BTRFS + LUKS for disk encryption. Wayland, although still a bit buggy for me, is useable.

Certainly there are still kinks to be worked out, but a stock KDE Plasma 5 desktop pretty closely resembles Windows, and there have been several feature/bugfix updates in the past two years. Valve's adoption of Plasma and Arch as the software platforms for their Steam Deck certainly have increased this momentum. There's even a native NTFS driver on Linux that was just committed to the kernel several months ago. Heck, even the fingerprint reader in the 7560 works with libfprint-tod (to be merged soon, presumably). 

Userspace Linux is picking up speed like never before. 

9 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

A great reason to call them laptops instead of notebooks

IMHO, that's like burning books because their content is offensive. If we want to push for certain trends, we should vote with our wallets, and not change names for the sake of it; it is as virtue-signalling as 'press Like for the poor starving African kids'.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the word 'notebook': the word was adopted decades ago for the mobile computer form factor with two panels connected by a hinge (that is reminiscent of paper notebooks); one panel with the display, and the other containing the keyboard, motherboard, other HID, connectivity, etc.

___

P.S.

9 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

emphais of form over function

There's also nothing intrinsically wrong with Apple MacBooks. That they are form over function is an opinion you have, which is fine; I think it is worth acknowledging that despite how locked down they are, they also have seriously impressive hardware, at least with the most recent M1 generation. I wouldn't buy one because I can't stand OS X; however, as a computer package, Macs are good; it's why Apple sells them by the boatloads now. 

I'm not a fan of any of the names (save perhaps NotebookTalk). EFGXT is difficult to relate to the subject matter, and I also disagree that we should make this a more 'generic' forum: that's what Linus Tech Tips are for. We do have subfora for the desktop discussions to go on, and I think that's a pretty decent way of catering to everyone without diluting the core aspect, which is... notebooks. 

34 minutes ago, Tenoroon said:

I mean, who the hell calls a laptop a "notebook" anymore lol.

Erm... That word is the basis for Apple's entire MacBook line. Macintosh notebook → Mac notebook → MacBook. Many other brands have 'Book' as a brand name, like Surface Book, HP ProBook, Razer Book, Asus VivoBook, etc etc...

19 minutes ago, serpro69 said:

Is it possible to add (optional?) markdown support in the editor?

I wish I could upvote twice. Markdown support would be phenomenal. If so, hopefully we choose a flavour of Markdown that is as comprehensive as possible, perhaps GitHub-flavoured Markdown + inline LaTeX support (so maybe something like math.stackexchange). 

This tells me there are two 'Microsofts'.

There's one that pushes great (and might I say, free!) developer tools, programming languages, and frameworks like VS Code, VS2022, C#/.NET (.NET 6 is superb), TypeScript, Azure, WSL, the MSVC STL (only one with best C++20 support), etc.

And there's the bean-counting one that justifies adding advertisements and crapware to Windows, pushing for SaaS (while still charging a LOT), changing the UX of Office programs every version, and pushing laggy Electron apps like the XBox store, Microsoft To-Do, Teams, etc.

Used to have a Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact; recently moved to an Xperia 5iii. I am honestly unimpressed by most phones, they all look and feel the same now. Only reason I got an Xperia is because it still has a tool-less SIM slot, 3.5mm jack, the only rectangular, notchless, hole punch-less OLED screen. 

I don't care for the camera on the phone.

For some reason, BIOS 1.7.0 appears to have been pulled from the 7560 driver download page. It's still available on the LVFS.

Have a home server inside a Fractal Design Node 304 running 4 HDDs in a striped mirror configuration. I eventually intend to move to an all-SSD setup when enterprise SSDs become a little cheaper inside a 4U rackmount unit.

4 minutes ago, serpro69 said:

has already started linking the archives in existing threads

Hmm, that works, but it requires a lot more manual intervention than merely pinning the equivalent subfora. Of course, whoever starts a '7530/7730 Owner's Lounge' could link to the corresponding archive themselves, but again, this still needs someone to trawl through the archive (although admittedly not too far behind). 

I was thinking—since the subfora here mostly mirror those at NBR, perhaps there could be pinned and locked posts in each subforum linking to the corresponding archive, so that anyone who wants to restart a thread can continue on discussions. For instance, the Dell Mobile Precision (and Latitude and Vostro) subfora could both have a post linking to the NBRCHIVE equivalent. 

What do you guys think?

P.S. It is slightly irritating that 'John Carlson''s post is near the top of the archive of the Precision/Latitude/Vostro subforums, not least with an audacious title like 'the next NBR is here'. What impudence. Last I checked on Reddit, 'laptop-forum.net' (I don't want to link to it) already has spam. What a fail. 🤣

Been driving our BMW G20 318i for exactly a year now. 11000 km on it so far. It's mostly city driving, so we average around 11.5 km/l. 

Dream cars are the facelifted M5 Competition to smoke others at the traffic signals, and the Audi A8L to float in a cloud. I wouldn't buy them where I live, though; they'd cost half a million dollars after tax.

If you guys want to post more improvements, maybe head over to the Site Suggestions subforum to post there? Incidentally, I agree with the favicon thing. @Reciever and the gang are pretty busy with the archival process, so I think we should give it some time and meanwhile, try to build up some discussion and content elsewhere on the forum. 

5 hours ago, Reciever said:

I could never fill in the shoes that Charles left behind, wish he was around. Maybe that will change in the future, hopefully it does even for a little while.

I do wish there was some way to reach out to the old mods; they had a thankless job and performed it with aplomb. Maybe Charles might be interested in continuing as a moderator here, as might @Custom90gt and a few others...