Aaron44126

Ehhh. I'd love to see them offer an AMD version, but I feel like Dell is pretty set in their ways with the business systems, and I feel like they're going to want to continue supporting things like vPro in these systems, so I am not holding my breath. I'm also underwhelmed with Intel's offerings lately. And, I wrote about it before... The thermal and CPU/GPU power contention issues on the Precision 7770 (which I see as a combined fault of Dell, Intel, and NVIDIA) plus the overall situation with Windows 11 have pushed me over to the MacBook side, something that I would have thought me completely crazy to be considering a few years ago. And while there are some things about the MacBook that I wish were different (modular RAM and storage at the top), I can't deny that it is the best "laptop" that I have ever had. I could write about that more, but I already have in other threads. I'm looking to have my "work" Precision 7560 replaced by a M4 Max MacBook Pro next year. Back to Dell. I am still interested to see what they do with the high-end Precision systems. We're due for a chassis refresh, so hopefully they will beef up the cooling solution a bit, and hopefully switch back to the "hot chips in the center / fan on both sides" design. Since Precision XX90 systems have already released (in the 3000- and 5000- line with 14th-gen Intel CPUs), I think we're due for a branding shakeup as well or at least a change to how model numbers work. (Maybe they'll just start using 4000 / 6000 / 8000.) They've got to have the design finalized or nearly finalized by now, but I haven't seen anything new pop up on things like hardware certification sites yet. Other than throwing in the latest CPUs from Intel and the latest GPUs from NVIDIA ... will they switch the bigger system to a 16:10 display (18" maybe)? Or will they dump the 17" offering altogether like the competition has? Will they make everyone start using CAMM2 modules and ditch SODIMM? I'm not really thinking we'll get any answers at CES, but certainly in the next few months. CES should bring some details about the new laptop CPUs and GPUs, though.

First thought — Is it an older system? Could the battery be going out? Try disconnecting the battery and see if this problem goes away. Sounds crazy but I have seen issues like this happen if the battery is becoming suspect, even while the system is plugged into power.

I seem to remember that this drive ran at a lower speed than the others. I think it is still PCIe3, but two lanes instead of four. [Edit] I think that is what the "4X" and "2X" mean in the table that you have embedded above.

This was fun. I remember bumping into Hector Martin (marcan42)'s work when hacking homebrew software onto my Nintendo Wii back in like 2008. That guy sure gets around the reverse engineering space.

Pretty sure the keyboard is the exact same part as the one used in 15" Latitudes of the day. If it "looks the same" then it will probably fit and work fine.

Moving this thread from the Dell section to the Clevo section...

Desktop 5000 Ada is AD102. Laptop is AD103. They don’t use the same chip.

Pretty sure ExpressCard is one lane PCIe 2. Maybe two lanes? I remember looking into it for an eGPU solution and it looked like the bandwidth was going to be quite limited. (Edit -- Wikipedia says one lane.) This system has SATA3 for the mSATA slot, so it should be a fair bit faster than USB2. It would be on par with other (2.5") SATA SSDs. I think the other mPCIe slots available are PCIe2 (up to four lanes), except for the MXM slot which is PCIe3 (16 lanes). I have not tried installing an NVMe drive into one of these systems, but I did install a NGFF M.2 Wi-Fi card into one of the mPCIe slots using an adapter. There is vertical clearance even with the bottom case on, but you have to be careful because the adapter can push down and scratch the motherboard. Put some electrical tape or something underneath. You can fudge a NVMe card into this system (using other PCIe slots with an adapter, as you have noted) but it won't be directly bootable. (The BIOS doesn't know to look for it.) You can boot it by chainloading with the OS on the NVMe drive, but the boot loader on another drive that the BIOS will check. I have not heard of someone using an NVMe drive in the MXM slot on this system, but I've seen it done in Alienware systems. There can be battery/power issues with the NVMe drive drawing power even when the system is powered off.

That's a good thought I hadn't considered. It could be concern if you have a high-end GPU. I've only had one Precision with a beefy enough GPU for this to be a concern (Precision 7770 + GeForce 3080 Ti) but it would occasionally dip into battery for extra power if I was playing a game. It wasn't consistent behavior, it probably happened less than 10 times during the year that I used that system. In this case I think you would probably just see some modest GPU throttling.

Every Dell laptop that I have ever tried has been able to run fine with no battery installed. In fact, several times I have forgotten to reconnect the battery-motherboard cable after performing service on the system, and didn't notice until I got to the Windows desktop and saw the "X" in the taskbar.

To my knowledge, this is not occurring on LTSC setups.

I watched the video presentation when the Asahi Linux Vulkan drivers were announced (about a month ago?). They've been working on that for a while now, but M3+M4 support is pretty much next on the hit list. Hopefully sometime next year... You're right. The cost is not trivial. But I don't regret what I paid... quite a laptop. 😄 I am already setting money aside for the next one (probably upgrading in 2028 ... M8, if they stick to the yearly cadence). (You can also look at education pricing. I understand that they're not very strict about who can get those...)

Do you know what Wi-Fi card it has installed presently? Most cards should work out-of-the-box on Linux. In any case, you can find an Intel 802.11ac mPCIe card for cheap (if that's not what it came with) and that will definitely work fine in Linux (Intel contributes drivers for their cards to the kernel). You can even install a newer NGFF Wi-Fi card in the WWAN slot with an adapter, if you don't want to put a mSATA drive there. If you can get NVIDIA Optimus working properly, this thing should have respectable battery life. (That would be Windows only. You need newer GPUs to use Optimus on Linux.)

Well look at that. You can finally download a Windows 11 ARM ISO directly from Microsoft. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11arm64

Eh, I don't see any real chance that Apple would buy Intel. What would they even do with that? They seem to be doing well enough on their own since they cut ties.

I'm still skeptical myself too, but I keep seeing more and more bad news about Intel, so I do wonder if they will be able to turn it around. Just today, news about AMD's market share spiking up in the face of the 13th/14th gen CPU crashing issues. If Intel can't reverse their current downward trajectory, they may well end up being acquired eventually. The most interesting thing to me is what the landscape is going to look like in another year or so once the Microsoft/Qualcomm ARM exclusivity agreement expires. In addition to Microsoft's (and others') general work making the ARM version of Windows 11 less painful to use, NVIDIA is going to enter the space, making ARM SOCs for Windows consumer systems, with a launch probably in fall 2025. Yet another option for people buying midrange systems. Intel might remain king of the high end, but they can't live off of that alone.

You should be able to do this with MDRAID on pretty much any distro. Set up the drives in a single RAID 0 pool. Requires a bit of terminal work to get it set up. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-raid-arrays-with-mdadm-on-ubuntu

Hello, this is me... Sort of. I've written about this in other threads. But I've been on macOS for a year and a half now and I love it. My migration wasn't exactly from Linux though. I wanted to dump Windows, and I spent a few months on Linux, determined that it wasn't cutting it for me, and then switched to macOS. I would say that while I may not be an expert, I am definitely not a Linux novice; I use it a lot for work, I normally have a Linux VM running in the background for various odd jobs, and I have been a server admin in the past as well; but, my attempts to use it as my personal "daily driver" have never managed to stick. I found Linux to be fine for games, but less so for productivity apps. I found myself just spending a lot of time in a Windows VM to use specific apps, which seemed to defeat the purpose of the switch. The Mac sort of flipped this, with almost all of the productivity apps that I use having Mac versions, but the gaming situation being not at good. Still, on macOS, I've been able to run most games that I'd like to play either with native versions, an emulator, or CrossOver, and there are definitely interesting things happening in the run-Windows-games-on-Mac space (constant iteration from CodeWeavers, Apple getting in themselves with Game Porting Toolkit + D3DMetal, and new open-source projects like DXMT). The other thing about Linux was, I was never able to find a desktop environment that I am fully happy with. The closest was KDE Plasma, which offers a huge raft of options for customization, but is really rough around the edges in some ways, with longstanding bugs that are easily reproducible but the devs don't really seem interested in addressing (or maybe it is a manpower problem). Other DEs either weren't customizable to the point where I felt comfortable using them, or just had some behaviors about them that I didn't like. Now, macOS itself is also lacking as a desktop environment but there are very many well-supported third-party additions or "helper apps" out there, and I have used some of those to bridge the gap. ...I did have to go through an adjustment period of getting used to new keyboard shortcuts and sort of the "Apple way" of doing things. So, I did buy a Mac for the OS, and it wasn't until afterwards that I fully realized what a good laptop the MacBook Pro is (Apple Silicon models in particular) — solid build quality, best-in-class touchpad, best-in-class display, and you don't have to choose between "good battery life + no heat/noise" and "high performance" — you can get both in the same machine (just depending on what you are running). Hardware-wise, there are definitely things that I wish were there that aren't, like a numeric keypad, and some degree of modularity (for storage/SSD in particular). There are also some behaviors of macOS itself that I would prefer be different, but I have mostly been able to work around those with third-party apps or my own scripting, which has satisfied my own need to "tinker" with the system. I also have a pretty Linux-like way of dealing with software installation/updates on the Mac, almost exclusively using Homebrew to manage third-party software installation and updates (both terminal stuff and GUI stuff). Oh, and Asahi Linux is there if you want to be able to dual-boot into a real Linux environment. You can run your regular Linux programs, and they've recently released a version of a GPU driver with Vulkan support, so it is possible to play Windows games using Steam+Proton. Work is still in progress around getting the rough edges smoothed out... and currently it only works with M1 and M2 chips, though M3+M4 should be added in the near future. You mentioned your phone. I was previously an iPhone user before getting a Mac, so I don't know what the Android situation would be like. I will say that the iPhone and the MacBook Pro get along very well together and I appreciate that as well. Photos sync pretty quickly, being able to handle messaging on the Mac is nice as well, and files can be transferred to the phone without even having to plug it in. If you have any specific areas of concern then I would be happy to share my experience. [Edit] Looking at what little bit of M4 Max performance numbers we have so far, whew, seems to be toppling even high-end desktop CPUs. Should have more info available later this week once the systems ship. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/apples-m4-max-is-the-single-core-performance-king-in-geekbench-6-m4-max-beats-the-core-ultra-9-285k-and-ryzen-9-9950x

This one. I don't think anything else is needed. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=86m99&oscode=wt64a&productcode=precision-m6700

Yes, to get this function, you need to install the touchpad driver from Dell's support page. It includes a GUI control panel with additional options which includes the function to turn the touchpad off if another mouse is connected. It works exactly like it did on Windows 7; the touchpad in this system is too old for Windows 10 to offer the option in its own native settings page.

You'll be looking for something like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/387256270062 Note, I don't know the part number for the UHD panel and I don't know if this item is the UHD or FHD version. Someone with the UHD panel can get the part number by visiting dell.com/support, putting in their service tag, and looking at the parts list. (Also I will say that it is likely that a Precision 7770 display would work fine, but I have not seen that confirmed.) I don't know where to get one from, either. I've purchased laptop displays from eBay sellers before but I have ended up disappointed more often than satisfied.

Yeah, I guess it wasn't clear in my post. It was previously unavailable through MSVS (despite being available to OEMs), but it became available through MSVS on October 1 (...I was downloading images from there at the same time that I made my post...), as well as through business volume license systems. I've been using it in an ARM VM on my Mac for a few months with no issues. Haven't upgraded any bare metal systems yet and probably will give it a good six months to shake out any issues. (I just saw this about an undeletable upgrade cache that you might get...)

You can swap the display. In this model, you have to replace the entire top of the laptop — display panel, enclosure, camera, and cabling. Dell offers. This as a single part (i.e. for warranty service). I’ve seen it, I had the panel in my Precision 7770 replaced *three times*. The panel by itself would be difficult to swap — it is held in place by adhesive, not screws. A new display cable will be needed but that should come with the part if you replace the entire top. If your FHD model has WWAN antennas, I think you will lose those too.

I would think that a 7670 display would work on a 7680, but I haven't seen confirmation from anyone who has tried this, so I'd only get it if it is returnable.

Microsoft Store is not "supported" on Windows LTSC, so it is not a surprise to me if it has eventually stopped working on old versions. You have two options to upgrade. You can upgrade to the latest non-LTSC version of Windows 10. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 (Note, support ends in about one year.) Or you can upgrade to a later LTSC version of Windows 10 (2019 or 2021) — not freely available as a download from Microsoft. (Support ends later — see the LTSC link in my sig.) Either will require a new license / product key / activation.