meowpressreturn

(this laptop = Precision 3551) Toasty! Order of screenshot below is current, min, max, and that current can be considered as idling, though today I'm in the other room and don't have the usual desk clip fan blowing across the keyboard which improves the idle temp by a good 5 degrees and can even get the SSD down near 50. The minimum temps are only seen very shortly after booting. The GPU reports 0 because its inactive, its real temp will be in the 60s too. Its a cool day here today so room ambient is probably a good 2 or 3 degrees under 30c 🙂 A while back I had to disable the turbo boost because it caused horrendously annoying coil whine, and this vastly improved temperatures too. With turbo active Dell lets the CPU go to 99, and it will do that anytime It has to do any kind of work and then idle in the 70s and 80s. With boost off it usually peaks in the 80s. The previous Samsung SSD I had used to idle in the 70s. I switched to SK Hynix P31 Gold which has much better thermals, and it needs them because whoever designed this machine didn't think the SSD was worthy of any airflow.

My new(ish) precisions suffered from lots of stutters and lags and sound glitches at regular intervals, and I found that hunting down and killing Dell stuff running in the background makes things a lot better. I also had awful troubles for a long time where my Precision 3551 would completely lag keyboard input for a second or two every 30 seconds or so. It was driving me absolutely nuts. I eventually discovered that this was occurring only when the discrete GPU (Quadro P620) was active. For reasons long forgotten I had Chrome set to always use the nvidia instead of the build-in intel (and would usually have YouTube open in Chrome on the external monitor playing something or other). I switched it to force intel, and with nothing using the nvidia GPU it doesn't seem to do this any more. That one I don't think showed up as interrupts though. Can't remember how I figured out what was causing it. I do have interrupt problems with an ancient Latitude 6430, where plugging anything into one of its USB3 ports will cause interrupts to go to about 30% and then stay like that until the machine is restarted or hibernated (the solitary USB2 port is fine).

Garbage trackpad. Garbage keyboard. I bet that palmrest gathers pools of sweat. Look at all that wasted real-estate on the side where you could put lots more USB ports. Nice big screen though. Does nobody actually do any work on computers these days? As a mindless content consumer why would I pick this over a Macbook? As someone actually doing some work why would I pick this? (over ... what?, its all garbage now! fml) I guess someone leasing them for a corporate fleet won't have anything to get alarmed about though. It looks exactly like every other generic blah machine and can run powerpoint.

That's good to hear. I've an ancient Vostro that I've been using on charger only without a battery for 15 over years. That battery suddenly decided it was faulty and would not charge anymore mere days after its warranty expired (after a year of perfect performance), and my older Latitudes with removable batteries are happy enough without one too. Somewhere along the line I had got an idea there might be throttling issues with newer Precisions with internal batteries and a GPU where the battery was needed to supply extra juice because the charger wasn't quite enough when the GPU was loaded. I've never tested that myself though.

Problem is Dell stop selling the batteries much too soon. My machines are still warrantied for another couple of years - except the battery which only got 1 year, and do Dell have those batteries anymore? lolnope What is particularly irritating is how the batteries do show up in the Dell site, and its only when you try to put one in your cart that it tells you its out of stock. My Precision 3551 battery is at 17% wear and doesn't seem to have swelling yet, so hopefully I can keep using it for a while yet. Its already pretty hopeless for using off the charger for anything more than moving from room to room or sending a few emails (Especially if trying to work in Visual Studio). Can maybe get a bit over an hour. Haven't tested if the machine can post with no battery or not, if it does maybe I can still use it with a bigger charger and no battery once this one gets spicy? Amusingly the 11 year old (long life) battery in my E6430 has finally started popping a warning dialog saying I may notice shorter usage time. (That ship sailed a decade ago. )

Finally got around to upgrading the 512gb SSD in my 7540. (Put in a 2tb SK Hynix P31 Gold) I had to resort to PLIERS to loosen the screw holding in the original SSD! 😱

The first motherboard replacement for my Precision 3551 was because the TPM module had died. Supposed to be next-day onsite service but this was in 2022 with logistics issues so I had to wait several weeks for them to get the part. My big worry was maybe they wouldn't be able to get it and might want to swap me to a 3561 - unacceptable as that model doesn't have touchpad buttons which was the primary reason I bought the 3551 in the first place! When they finally installed the new motherboard it failed within minutes of the technicians departure, with "Power surge on the USB port" every few seconds and continual USB bleeping noises. Luckily I only had to wait until the next day for that one to be replaced. --- re: Precision 7540, I have one of those too, and its build quality is much better and more solid than the Latitude-based 3551, but that one is already on its second screen as the one it shipped with refused to support Dell Premuim Color, and DPC is necessary to change to a reasonable colour profile as the default one is some garish vibrant thing where every colour is maxxed out and is horrible for anything except showing off the screen in a bright store front. I have the 4k screen in the 7540, and ... I like the 1080p screen in the 3551 a lot better. Much nicer to work with for long periods. The 7540 is bigger and significantly heavier than the 3551, also was much more expensive, so that one I keep at home and isn't my daily driver. The 7540 can be expanded to 128 GiB (mine has only 16 but now that prices for older memory are down I'm looking to expand it - I see a lot of people have trouble using the 3200mhz ram so will be looking for 2666) and it has 3 NVMe slots, and if you don't have the 97Wh battery there's also room for a 2.5" SATA drive (not sure if any of the smaller batteries also use this space, might need the smallest one?). Mine has the big battery but even so battery life when off charger isn't great because its a power-hungry machine. --- Batteries are an issue with non-current laptops. Its hard to get replacements. Even though the rest of the machine is still under warranty Dell only gave one year warranty on the batteries, and don't see fit to supply that model any more. They are very cheeky with this - you can see the part in their store and all looks good, but when you go to add to cart it gives you "Sorry, Dell 6-cell 97 Wh Lithium Ion Replacement Battery for Select Laptops is out of stock or no longer offered. We removed it from your cart." (ditto for the 3551 battery). I should have bought spares back when I bought the machine, but I was already out of money 😞 Also, neither of these models is suitable for use on your actual lap. The base gets much much too hot for that.

Mine is still under warranty and I don't have experience repasting so haven't been brave enough to try repasting it myself (yet!), so its whatever rubbish the Dell onsite technician used when he re-assembled it last time. Reading other people's posts about this model on Dell support forums, reddit, etc suggests repasting will improve the situation, but will still be relatively hot machine. So far I think the only thing I've done that might vaguely count as a cooling mod is adding bigger rubber feet to the bottom which elevates it a little more above the desk which might improve airflow a little. (But my main reason for doing that is to make it feel better to type on due to the 'shock-absorbing' action of the rubber lol).

I have a Precision 3551 with i7-10850H and Quadro P620 which I got refurbished from Dell outlet. Although its named Precision, the 3551 is really just a Latitude 5511 with delusions of grandeur. This means its much much lighter and more portable than the 7-series Precisions though. But it isn't a great machine, I'm on my third motherboard already, and find the machine suffers from poor thermals. Googling info on this model suggests heat and fan noise is the common complaint for this model. After a BIOS update it developed nasty coil whine, squeaking like a pack of giant rats were having a party and then they invited all their bat friends along and everyone started dancing on lino in rubber shoes. This very audible and extremely annoying noise was cured only by disabling turbo boost in BIOS thus limiting the processor to 2712 mhz which helped the heat a fair bit too. The CPU and GPU share a single fan which noisily blows a lot of heat out the vent on the left most of the time and I have to use a little USB clip-fan on the edge of my desk to blow over the keyboard or it becomes quite unpleasant. Before disabling turbo boost, the CPU used to get up near 100c a lot of the time and hang around there. Now it tends to peak down in the 80s, and idle in the mid to high 50s. That i7-10850H processor looks juicy on paper, but Dell already limited the processor to 35w instead of the 45w it would normally do and I reckon all that heat means its still gonna give Jack the Ripper a run for his money in the throttling department.

I was fool enough to get the 4K screen with my 7540 and ... I really don't like it. Just for starters Dell had to replace the screen once already because Dell Premier Color refused to consider it supported and no amount of re-installing drivers would fix that, and you need to use DPC to make the colours reasonable - without that its in 'vibrant' mode, so every shade of colour is maxed out and it makes your eyes bleed. Even with DPC to set a better profile I can never really get it to feel 'right' and it somehow manages to accomplish the feat of being both too bright and too dim at the same time. The 4K screen also meant I had issues updating the 7540 BIOS - it was thanks to posts on here that I found out you needed to use an external keyboard and monitor via USB-C and close the lid to be able to update it! Stuff like this is what makes this forum so valuable to me. Dell had no clue about this. Also, old Winamp and 4K screens don't play well together, you literally need a magnifying glass. Had to use WACUP on that machine instead. HWInfo lists it as AU Optronics [Unknown Model: AUO41EB]. Meanwhile the 1080p screen on my Precision 3551 is perfection out of the box, no tweaking or DPC required. Wonderful display (AU Optronics [Unknown Model: AUO26ED]). Can't say that for much else about the 3551 though. It does have some good points but overall its a bit of a lemon. One of these days I mean to make a post about it. I got it because it met my #1 criteria for laptops, something no newer models do: specifically, it has touchpad buttons. And when the touchpad is actually in a good mood and behaving properly its a very nice touchpad. I don't like mice, and the modern buttonless touchpads are unusable garbage. I've *tried* to get used themwith various work issued machines, but no joy.

Thought I'd post some intimate under the casing pics from my 7540 here as I was poking about in there today. I'm thinking of once again replacing the SSD in my daily driver Precision 3551 with a bigger and hopefully cooler one. SDDs come in many sizes but always leave in one size (full) 😛 Which means that solid state heater the 3551 has (1 TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus, the older model with the Phoenix controller) will end up in here. Since that still leaves me a vacant slot maybe I'll throw in the 512 GB Kioxia my 3551 originally came with as well, assuming two years in the back of a cupboard haven't killed it already. See how. Interesting to see that the 7540's metal plates for the SSD come with an adhesive thermal pad (unlike the 3551's SSD plate edit: the 3551 SSD plate DOES have a thermal pad but I still got terrible terrible temps with the Samsung SSD in the 3551, whereas the SK Hynix SSD in my 7540 is practically cold! ). That sticky thing with the "Laird" label IS a thermal pad right? If I'm putting in an SSD in there or more RAM in those DIMM slots, will I need to remove those plastic label things? I should probably open the casing and deal with dust more often, although, even with that dust, and unlike every other Dell laptop I've ever owned, the 7540 actually seems to have reasonable cooling (in contrast, the 3551's idea of cooling is an absolute joke). However every time I open that case I lose another little plastic clippy thingy 😞

Ran the same test again just now (no laptop location or hardware or config changes) and got 364 down and 179mbps up this time (vs 273/143). So quite some variability there.

Quick & dirty test using the one in Google gives me this for my WIFI. The connection is 1gbps fibre so should be a lot faster but the router is getting old, its pre-pandemic hardware so at least 5 or 6 years old now, and there's a couple of walls in the way. Not sure why the asymmetry, think its not always like that. I've actually got a newer router or two still sitting unboxed on the shelf and I'm too lazy to go set it up.

The original feet on one of my older (2008) laptops succumbed to rubber rot years ago and I gave it new feet by sticking on those little self-adhesive rubber pads you can get from a hardware store for sticking on the bottom of chair legs and other furniture to protect the flooring. This worked so well I've gone and done it for all my newer machines too (*). Gives a few mm extra height for better airflow and being more springy than the built-in feet it means the laptop doesn't feel and sound so 'hard' when I'm typing fast which is the main reason I added them. It really makes a big difference in comfort. Before that I felt like I was typing directly on the table! (* except the Precision 7540 which has nasty long rubber pads across the entire width of the base instead of discrete feet. I don't really like this design. )

I thought it was just a few weeks ago I joined and apparently its a whole year already. Guess they don't make years like they used to. Came here after the old ship sank, though I'd only posted once or twice back there. It was such a great resource for finding solutions to weird laptop problems. I don't like to throw things out so I now have a handful of mainly Dell laptops from various years, and a few other ancient machines. So I need to spend a lot of time finding solutions to laptop problems. The new machines especially seem to be a lot more problematic than the old machines. Guess they don't make laptops like they used to either.