Aaron44126

I mean, I'm sure 4K looks really cool on a nice external 27"+ display, but on a laptop 17" it seems to be overkill.

@Dell-Mano_G has made statements indicating that they are not worried about OLED burn-in anymore, but I kind of want to wait and see what a system is like 3+ years into its life before we can really be sure about that. They did offer OLED in Precision 5000 some years back and ended up removing it in later systems because of quality issues like image retention. (I think that microLED is supposed to address many shortcomings of OLED but that technology being ready for laptops is still some years out...) Dell typically doesn't offer a huge number of display panel choices... so we aren't going to see, for example, 1200p/1600p/2400p each offered in your choice of LCD or OLED. They aren't even offering a non-OLED high-DPI display on the Precision 76X0 systems right now. And, for their business laptops Dell seems to avoid offering a choice between FHD and UHD, so I sort of doubt that we'll see a 1600p option at all. I do think that 18" 16:10 could make an appearance whenever the refresh the chassis again. Personally, I prefer that 4K or 2400p sticks around so that I can run at 200% DPI scaling, as I can see an improvement (vs 1440p/1600p) in static content and I have some applications that behave better at 200% than they do at non-integer scaling ratios. Though for gaming (or other types of "dynamic" full motion content), I've been experimenting on my Precision 7770 and found that I can't really tell any difference between 1440p and 4K, so I've stopped trying to run games at 4K to save ≈50% on the GPU load (unless maybe DLSS is an option and it performs decently).

https://www.theblock.co/post/225497/sam-bankman-fried-alameda-report One of the more eye-catching items concerned Alameda Research, the trading firm that allegedly had access to billions of dollars in customer funds stored with FTX. The report states that Alameda “often had difficulty understanding what its positions were, let alone hedging or accounting for them.” Former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, now under house arrest and facing a litany of criminal charges, described Alameda in internal communications as “hilariously beyond any threshold of any auditor being able to even get partially through an audit,” according to the report. He went on: “Alameda is unauditable. I don’t mean this in the sense of ‘a major accounting firm will have reservations about auditing it’; I mean this in the sense of ‘we are only able to ballpark what its balances are, let alone something like a comprehensive transaction history.’ We sometimes find $50m of assets lying around that we lost track of; such is life.” ... The management of private keys and seed phrases — used to control access to crypto assets — was shambolic, according to the report. In one example, private keys for over $100 million in Ethereum assets were stored in plain text without encryption on an FTX Group server; in another, single-signature-based keys that controlled access to billions of dollars in crypto assets were stored in AWS Secrets Manager or a password vault, each accessible by numerous employees; and many private keys were stored without back-up procedures, meaning funds would be permanently lost if the associated key was. The list goes on.

PBS also got the same label in the US. And, there are some issues with the implementation. For example, clicking on the "government funded" label takes you to a help page about the "state-affiliated" label which says that the state exercises control over the content. Also, both NPR and BBC operate numerous Twitter handles and so far only their main handles have been given this label. It seems like things are being slapped together haphazardly (par for the course).

I've been thinking about picking this one up, but I'm hearing that the PC version is pretty riddled with bugs so I think waiting a month (or several) for patches might be in order. Up to about 65 hours with XC3 and nowhere near the end. There's just so much to do. Still enjoying myself (or else I'd just make my way to the end and stop doing side stuff). This will probably end up being the longest amount of time I've ever spent with a JRPG.

Meanwhile, Musk decides NPR is "state-affiliated media", the same label given to propaganda outlets in Russia and China, going against Twitter's own policy (subsequently updated to remove references to NPR), despite the fact that NPR operates independently and receives around 1% of its funding from federal sources. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/twitter-labels-npr-state-affiliated-media-contradicting-its-own-policy/ ...But realizes that perhaps it was a mistake. https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-npr-state-affiliated-media-label-2023-4 https://www.npr.org/2023/04/07/1168728804/musk-asks-basic-facts-about-npr-after-labeling-it-state-affiliated-media-on-twit Apparently yesterday, they switched the label to "government funded". https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/08/twitter-changes-label-on-npr-account-from-state-affiliated-to-government-funded/

Dell has consistently done two generations per chassis since the Precision 7000 series launched. We could be due for a chassis refresh next year. I think that, if they do that, they will go ahead and change the naming scheme as well.

Yes. Apparently, it switches which controller your device gets plugged into internally based on what you connect. So, if you plug a USB1 device in directly, it will go to the USB 1.1 controller which will not work. Going through a USB2 hub is a “hack” to force it to go through the system’s USB 2 controller. I have since connected my Discord and Facebook Messenger accounts to Beeper and those are working fine as well. Having everything in one spot is nice. And I saw on GitHub that they are working on a Google Voice bridge; I use Google Voice as a secondary phone number so it would be nice to have those SMS messages in there too.

WWAN version uses a different screen enclosure/back panel as well. Instead of all aluminum, there is a separate plastic bit at the top where the antennas are.

Another cool thing I noticed with Beeper. Inbound SMS messages with 2FA codes (i.e. that you get when logging into a bank web site) are automatically identified and it copies the code to your clipboard, so you can just paste it into the web site without having to go through any additional steps. Slick.

They haven’t announced any specs for Framework Laptop 16 yet, but are promising a full reveal later in the spring.

MS Defender definition updates will continue while Windows Update is paused. (I pause it every month and just open it up when I want to run monthly patches, and I have checked on this.) Microsoft has become more aggressive with the Windows 11 upgrade, I’m not surprised to see it being installed for people who didn’t really ask for it. (This is exactly why I prefer the LTSC version…)

Backwards compatibility with games/apps is fine and not something I really hear complaints about. Personally, my main issue with Windows 11 is that Microsoft feels fine changing/adding stuff in monthly updates rather than waiting for the yearly feature updates, and their update QC doesn’t seem to be as good as it used to be. I have other issues (some of them “philosophical”) which I have written about in the article linked in my sig. But for most people, Windows 11 will be fine. You have 10 days to roll back anyway, so you can give it a try.

It absolutely did. I did not hear them cycle on at all when I first powered it up which is a big change from what I normally got from the Delta fans. I have done close testing to see if I can hear them turn on at all, since I rarely reboot and the fans are just always on rather than cycling on and off now …..

Microsoft update aggression at its finest… After the first reboot, you’ll be at a screen where it is spending a while doing the update and giving you a % progress. Just force the system off (hold the power button down) during this and start it up again. You might have to do it twice, but it will give up and dump you back on Windows 10 with an error saying the upgrade failed. If you don’t want to do that, then you have 10 days after the upgrade to roll back to Windows 10. I’ve done this multiple times without issue. The option is in Settings under Recovery.

Yeah, I was thinking that this could be an issue with the battery not being able to provide high power output. The system should not abruptly power off, no matter what load you throw at it. I’m still thinking the battery is the most likely culprit and I would not be the least bit surprised if it is a poor-quality non-Dell battery put in there by your refurb vendor, which would explain its apparent healthiness but poor behavior.

This has been addressed directly. The heatsink is in the expansion bay with the dGPU. You don't detach the heatsink separately from the GPU card; they swap in and out together as one unit (in a way, similar to desktop GPUs). This allows for a different size heatsink depending on the dGPU, and you don’t even have to repaste anything when swapping the dGPU.

I'm not sure about this gen, but in past gens there has been a restriction preventing you from choosing both WWAN and the UHD display together; you had to pick one or the other. (I have Precision 7770 with UHD display and it did not come with WWAN antennas.)

I think that it will be Optimus / hybrid graphics only. There is nothing in the expansion bay pinout regarding display passthrough from the dGPU. There would have to be a number of pins dedicated to passing through an eDP signal, but there is nothing of the sort. Direct output from the dGPU to an external display might be possible using the USB-C connector on the back of the system (the GPU bay), or maybe they will add other outputs like mDP/HDMI to the GPU bay. (The expansion bay can provide additional outputs on the back side of the system.) There's also still no indication as to which GPUs will even be available. With "rumors" that NVIDIA has been rejecting most laptop designs with modular GPU chips, I wouldn't be surprised if the GPU selection is AMD-only, at least at first. There should be a full spec reveal for Framework Laptop 16 before the end of "spring". [Edit] Nevermind, I take it back. I thought that the right DGFF port was PCIe only, so I just looked at the left port pins. But on the right port, past the PCIe lanes, there are DisplayPort pins listed as "DisplayPort interface for internal display" and some other display pins like backlight PWM control. So, it does look like it should be possible to connect the internal display directly to the dGPU.

Are you on BIOS version 1.10? I don't think anyone has confirmed whether Dell has updated the Intel microcode yet. It is expected that this will happen with an upcoming BIOS update, and when they do, undervolting will not work anymore.

I wouldn't want to live with this... I am doubting that this is a software issue at all and I can't see drivers causing the system to abruptly power off. I think that most likely it is just a bad battery. I'm assuming that this is not under warranty with Dell? (Dell does offer a one-year warranty on Dell Outlet systems, but it sounds like you got it from someplace else.) You can check the warranty status at dell.com/support, and if it does happen to be covered then you can just have Dell replace the battery. Otherwise, here's what I would do. Open it up and see if the battery is even a genuine Dell battery. Non-Dell batteries seem to be problematic more often than not. Reseat the battery cable while you are in there. (Probably won't fix it but you never know...) Replace the battery. See if you can get your vendor to do this; clearly, it has a problem. If they can't/won't source a genuine Dell battery, it's probably worth buying one on your own if you want to keep the system. If the issue still occurs with a new (Dell) battery, I think you're looking at replacing the motherboard. In any case, you shouldn't wait long before raising the issue with your vendor in case the system has some kind of return window that you could miss.

I'll fix the link. "Restart BG thread" button lights up only if the background thread crashes.

New heatsink from Dell arrived. (Still have another one on the way; I'll keep it as a spare.) Here it is, as it came: Observations: My original heatsink had Delta fans and this one has Sunon fans. This is the same swap that @win32asmguy got way back in August or September; I saw that @MyPC8MyBrain got the opposite swap back in December with one of his systems (system came with Sunon fans and Dell sent a Delta fan replacement). Compared to the one that @win32asmguy got (pictured below in the spoiler block), mine has a much yuckier job with the GPU thermal paste. It looks like they might have added it afterwards rather than used a factory "stamp". It was "goopy" and some of it got stuck to the plastic packaging material (as you can see here), but it still seemed to be covering the copper surface well enough, so I put it in without attempting to clean and repaste. (I'm more concerned with the CPU paste application than the GPU; it's really hard to overheat the GPU in this thing.) They didn't do a great job with some of the thermal pad positions and I fixed those up before putting it in. (Also, different colored thermal pads compared to the one that @win32asmguy received.) Before: My system has a fair amount of apps open but not much going on. CPU load ≤4% (mostly on P cores), turbo boost disabled. Average CPU core temperatures in the upper 50's °C, and fan speed RPM in the 1400-1500 range. After: Fan speed consistently lower by a couple hundred RPM, temperatures lower by a few degrees, more than I got from repasting but not a major difference by any stretch. I'll say that I like the fan better though. I can't hear it powering on and it is generally quieter, and I might be making this up but it also seems to be kicking more heat out the back at low RPM. I'm not going to mess with it anymore for now since the system seems to be stable and performs within my needs. But if it gets worse I'll probably ask about a system replacement. (I still have an outstanding issue that pops up when running Optimus disabled, too...)

Twitter's recommendation algorithm is open source. GitHub Twitter blog post The Verge article [Edit] Just find it kind of funny that the pitch at the end of the Twitter blog post asking people to join links just to an email address, rather than something like an actual HR jobs portal with a list of open positions and a process to submit an application. I wonder how well their recruitment process is going right now .....

@Dell-Mano_G I was wondering if you could take a look at these quick questions regarding the new 7000 series systems. Small list this time, it seems at a glance that the systems aren't much different than last year's. Am I right in assuming that there is no PCIe5 support in these systems? (Intel has been teasing it for their latest HX CPUs but it doesn't seem to be of much use yet, with no discrete GPUs and very few SSDs supporting it.) Other than the CPU & GPU refresh, are there any notable changes to point out? Is the "thin chassis" option for the Precision 76X0 gone? Can you share anything about CPU & GPU power limits for these systems? Have power limits been increased at all from Precision 7X70? Thank you.