Aaron44126

Still watching the weather, I have a potential spot in Indiana that I'm looking at. Worried about traffic, too. It might not work out.

Looks like you are pretty close to the best spot! (Assuming that the weather cooperates... Quick weather search here looks like it may well be fully overcast in that area like I am seeing for Texas.) You should definitely take care when looking directly at the sun. I bought some solar glasses from Amazon some weeks back. They work great, basically producing black vision, can't see anything other than the outline of the sun if you look at it. It is safe to look without glasses for the few minutes when the sun is totally covered if you are in the path of totality. (Looks like your map has color codes indicating how long that is by location.) That is supposed to be a really cool experience but I have never seen it before, though I can imagine how it would be difficult to fully capture what is is like on camera / live stream.

Anyone in the U.S. or Mexico going to try to make it? I was going to try to view from Texas, but the weather is looking uncooperative. Thinking there might be a shot to view it from Indiana or maybe Ohio (closer to where I live) if I can just find somewhere where it looks like there will be a break in the cloud cover. Watching weather forecasts keep changing, I know there won't be truly decent cloud coverage predictions until a day or two before...

Yes, the USB ports are powered on even if the system is powered off. I believe there is an option in the BIOS called "USB powershare" which might control this — I just leave it on as that is the preferred behavior for me. (You can actually use the system as a giant USB battery even if the AC adapter is not plugged in, i.e. to charge your phone while traveling.)

Precision 7770 does not support PCIe 5. You can install a PCIe 5 drive and it will run at PCIe 4 speeds — There is no point in spending extra money on it, unless you think you might want to reuse the drive in a future system down the line. I had three Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 8 TB drives in my Precision 7770. One of them died after less than a year. Sabrent replaced it without hassle under warranty (took about two weeks) but the replacement drive has very audible coil whine noises or something coming from it that kick in when there is a sudden burst of write activity. My opinion of Sabrent has thus soured and I will not be purchasing any more of their SSDs. Since I stopped using the Precision 7770, I have repurposed all of that storage as NAS storage in my basement so the noise is a non-issue at the moment.

25 years. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/ftx-fraudster-sam-bankman-fried-sentenced-to-25-years-in-prison/ https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241210300/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-sentencing-crimes-crypto-mogul-greed

We're due for a chassis refresh so maybe next year they will "fix" this. (Or, maybe not... It's not just Precision systems that they have done this to, so maybe this is just the way things are now.)

Could be worse... Precision 7X70 and later can't have the keyboard replaced "from the top", you have to disassemble the entire system from the bottom (take out the heatsink, motherboard, inner frame) in order to access the keyboard and swap it out. 😕 I have also been using these things since the M6700 and I don't understand how come they can't have a decent keyboard when they have been able to do it in the past.

I have 7560 and I think the keyboard is identical. It has paint flaking off like you said, and a couple of keys are starting to not always register presses. Disappointing in a premium laptop, for sure. The keyboard is easy enough to replace, and I will probably have Dell send a new one before the warranty expires.

I can't claim for sure that this is the culprit, but I have also seen these laptops act weird without the battery. Are you using 180W or 240W power adapter? Do you have a 240W that you could try?

Is the behavior any different if you apply a power limit to the dGPU? I think you can do this with the nvidia-smi command line tool by giving a value in watts. (I.e. nvidia-smi --power-limit=50) It could be related to NVIDIA dynamic boost, but the techniques I've messed with to work around that are for the opposite situation (GPU gets throttled in combined load)...

I guess I'll drop an update... I've been really enjoying being off of Windows, even if the Linux switch didn't work out. I do have a Windows VM that runs 24/7 under Parallels which I pretty much just use for two apps, but I find Windows a lot more tolerable to use as a "container" for hosting apps in a VM rather than for driving the entire system. (Also, I found that the Windows 11 Enterprise 22H2 ARM image that I used, that I did get directly from Microsoft, was pleasantly clean and a lot more like an LTSC image in that it didn't come with the crufty bundled apps or even Microsoft Store installed.) I also still have to RDP to an x64-based Windows system in order to use my 10+-year-old network-attached scanner, which doesn't have a driver for either ARM macOS or ARM Windows. I'll replace it eventually... I'm going to be setting up a 24/7 Linux VM too; I have a few things that make more sense to run under Linux but I've been waiting for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to be ready (or "almost" ready). I'm just going to use GNOME. Mostly I'll just be setting up some background jobs to run on it. Gaming on macOS has been fine. There are a handful of titles that I can't run but more than enough that I can run to keep me happy. I do miss Switch emulation; I believe that situation will solve itself in due time, but for now Ryujinx has a Mac version that is "not there yet" (performance issues + crashes are not uncommon), and the whole legal situation with yuzu is sad. (At the moment, just using a "real" Switch when I want to play a Nintendo game...) Otherwise, the emulation scene on macOS is in really good shape, and CrossOver+GPTK works pretty well for running most Windows games that do not have Mac ports. The big blocker is newer big Windows games that require AVX (which for the moment are mostly ports of previously exclusive PS5 games). No way to run those without an Intel/AMD CPU for now. I was on the fence for a while, but more recently I decided that I'm going to also push for a MacBook to replace my work system, which is due for a refresh later this year. We're a Windows shop at work but there are a few people in the org that use a Mac, so it wouldn't be unprecedented. I can get most of my work done in Visual Studio Code, and whatever is left that is Windows-specific I can either do from a local Windows VM or a remote Windows system via RDP.

Wired Ethernet Wi-Fi 6 I can complain about a lot of things with AT&T, but the speed is not one of them.

Double-sided works fine in all slots.

7750 was definitely offered with a 4K display. There is not a different variation of the motherboard to support a different type of display. You should be able to just replace the display panel and the display cable. Don't try to use an adapter. Find the 40-pin version of the eDP cable designed specifically for this system. What I am not sure about is if the display enclosure / "lid" is the same between the two different types of displays. Also, I am not sure if the display is attached to the display enclosure with screws, or with adhesive. You can check on that last one easily enough by just removing the display enclosure bezel. (Open the laptop as far as it will go and then just carefully pull off the bezel starting from the one of the bottom corners. It is attached with a little bit of adhesive but mostly plastic clips and can easily be snapped back on.) My Precision 7770 display panel was attached to the enclosure with adhesive. When Dell replaced the display for me, the part that they got was a full top lid (display panel + enclosure as one part). I have checked a Precision 7530 and Precision 7560 and those both had displays attached to the enclosure with screws, but, someone on this forum had an in-between system (Precision 7540 I think?) that did use adhesive and not screws. If it is attached with adhesive then I think it'd be a pain to replace, you'd have to get new adhesive strips and then work carefully to align the panel properly when putting it in.

Windows has a "kernel" just like Linux does. It is found at "C:\Windows\System32\ntoskrnl.exe" (which you can inspect for the build date & version number) and is reported as the "System" task in Task Manager. It is updated as part of the monthly patching process when needed.

Well. That didn't last long? One of the few "features" of Windows 11 that was actually something of a draw to me is being killed. https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/5/24091370/microsoft-windows-11-android-apps-end-of-support

Nothing new here, they already have a 16" Precision 5680 with RTX 5000 and Intel 13th-gen CPUs which has been available for about a year. The 5690 is basically the same thing with a CPU refresh. Since we haven't seen any hint of 14th-gen HX workstations from Lenovo or HP either, I think that @yslalan has identified the reason... Intel is not producing workstation versions of their 14th-gen HX CPUs, so everyone has to skip this generation.

I have had non-stop trouble with the audio driver in my Precision 7560, with headphones in particular. To get around this I am just now connecting my headphones via USB, which bypasses the Realtek/Waves audio system. (I also disable "audio enhancements" for the USB-connected headphones, you can set that in the Sound Control Panel.) If your headphones do not support USB connection, you can use a simple external DAC like the Apple USB-C/3.5mm adapter.

Note, I have found that the GPU can actually be on when this activity indicator says that it is off. You have to use NVAPI to check and see if it is "really" on or not. Anyway, if it gets stuck on you can "fix" it by going to Device Manager, disabling the dGPU, and then enabling it again. That seems to kick it into powering off properly. (On my Precision 7770, I had to do that after every reboot.)

https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/the-new-precision-workstations-are-here/ Precision 3000 and 5000 refresh announced. 7000 is MIA.

I have actually never tried using Dell's reset tool... I just do the Windows install directly. Use the tool here to make a bootable USB Windows installer. (If you want Windows 10, it looks like they have taken the wizard tool away but you can download an ISO image and then flash it onto a USB drive with Rufus.) Also drop onto the USB drive any drivers you might immediately need after the install to get online (i.e. Wi-Fi). Boot the installer, delete existing partitions on the disk and install Windows. Get online and run Windows Update once, it should pull in the remaining drivers. Install any Dell tools that you might want (i.e. Dell Optimizer). Alternatively, if your Windows install is working you can kick off a "reset" right from there which will erase all data and set up a fresh Windows install. I think it is in Settings -> Windows Update -> Advanced options -> Recovery.

I strongly recommend to just disable capsule updates and just apply BIOS updates manually. It would be one thing if Dell could be trusted to vet these properly, but as we can see... To note — After a BIOS update package has been downloaded and installed from Windows Update, it will attempt to upgrade the BIOS at every reboot if the current BIOS version is less than the downloaded package version, even if Windows Update is paused. So, you could take steps to roll back to an earlier BIOS version and find your work undone the next day. (To stop it from doing this, you'd have to roll back the driver for the "Firmware" device which you can find in Device Manager.) The timing for listing BIOS updates on Windows Update is sporadic. If Dell rolls a 1.19 update that fixes this issue, it might not show on Windows Update for multiple days, or weeks (if ever).

Does it work with any monitor (using the same port)?

Windows will automatically update the BIOS if it has downloaded a BIOS update package for your system from Windows Update. If you do not want this to be a possibility, go to BIOS setup and turn off the option for "capsule updates".