Precision 7560 & Precision 7760 owner's thread

[Pultzar]

Ya I was thinking some sort of lap table would be in order.  I'm also trying to decide between the 16" and 17" models.  As neither are truly portable (like a Microsoft Surface), perhaps it is more about 120hz vs OLED screen?  Unfortunately I have used neither to know which one I would prefer.

[Aaron44126]

Did anyone order a Precision 7X60 with the cheapest 256GB / 2230 drive option?

 

I'm wondering how the 2230 drive fits in, and if it could be easily swapped out for a 2280 drive.  I didn't realize that they were offering anything other than 2280 drives.  Do they use an extender to bring it up to 2280 size, or do they actually have a smaller plastic caddy thing (& heatsink) that they use for this configuration?

 

[Edit]

Looking like they only put the 2230 drive into one of the secondary slots, so the primary slot "caddy" doesn't matter?

[alittleteapot]

That's exactly how I got mine, too.  It's just a spacer to make the 2230 function just like the 2280, and I believe it fits into the primary drive caddy just fine.  I sort of forgot it was in the primary slot or not when I initially got the laptop.

[Rinconmike]

I am powering my 7760 with the WD19DCS.  Any issues with plugging in the power brick at the same time?  Can it be done while on or only before power on?

[Aaron44126]

1 minute ago, Rinconmike said:

I am powering my 7760 with the WD19DCS.  Any issues with plugging in the power brick at the same time?  Can it be done while on or only before power on?

 

No issues, you can plug it in at any time.

[RockoDesvan]

Hi there! Is nice to see how the group moved successfully to this new thread from the "old days" 😄 

I have a Precision 7760 and I have been having issues with lot of things 😛 

- The spots on the 4K screen that seems to be a design issue  (I saw that someone here also had the display issues, if I remember correctly), because this is the second unit I received with the same problem -and the tech support insists on sending a new display to see if that resolves the problem, which I really doubt it would-.

- Overheating of the PCI e Gen 4x4 ssd on it's proper slot (it reaches 89°c using premiere pro, causing drastic performance problems, same behavior with the two unit I have tested (but the disappearing ssd just was present on the 1st unit, the removed a switch it had, as some of you mentioned on this thread- 

Tech support is trying to solve the issues, to no avail - I hope both of this issues is not present on the 7770/7760 😛

Now, I was hoping someone could help me with the sound issues I've been having since day one, with both units:
The random pops during playback of any media (both video and sound).
The only place I notice there's no popping is when I use the headphone jack of the laptop. But it's present on the laptop speakers, and even on the speakers of an external monitor connected via HDMI.

I have tried deleting the Realtek and Nvidia drivers (I have the RTX A5000 video card) and it seems to temporally solve the problem. But after any reboot, or on a fresh boot, it always comes back.
I have also disabled all of the audio enhancements and tweaking the audio quality to no avail.
I've seen on the Dell forum that there are other users with the same kind of audio issues and none of them seem to have a solution.

I was wondering if someone had this audio problem, and if so, how did you solved it?
When I had the 7750, the only thing I remember that kinda worked was to re install windows from scratch -until a Windows 10 update broke the audio again, bringing back the pops.

Sorry for the long post! And thanks in advance for you help with this!

[Aaron44126]

36 minutes ago, RockoDesvan said:

The random pops during playback of any media (both video and sound).

With audio pops, the first thing to do is to download LatencyMon and run it in the background for a bit, while you go about your business doing whatever you do when you notice these pops.  This is a very annoying problem which I fought with for a while on my Precision M6700.  There have been multiple causes but I was always able to chase them down starting with LatencyMon.

 

LatencyMon will measure how much CPU time each driver gets before returning control to Windows.  If a driver runs for too long, the audio buffer could underrun and that causes an audio blip or "pop".  Here, a "driver" is basically anything that runs in kernel mode (.sys files) — it could be hardware device driver, or a piece of security software, or just some core Windows component.

 

So, after LatencyMon has been running for a while, check the "Drivers" tab which should be sorted by "highest execution time".  I'd say anything with a value over 2-3ms is suspect, though really it would have to be a good bit higher than that in order to start causing noticeable audio pops.  (My M6700 has the storage driver pop up to around 3.5ms and I don't experience audio pops there.  I definitely notice them sometimes if something is hitting up around 10ms though.)  Anyway, the next action depends on what you see using the most time.

 

If you try this and see nothing reporting more than 2-3ms "highest execution time" then I guess the problem lies elsewhere...

[Rinconmike]

7 hours ago, RockoDesvan said:

I have a Precision 7760 and I have been having issues with lot of things 😛 

- Overheating of the PCI e Gen 4x4 ssd on it's proper slot (it reaches 89°c using premiere pro, causing drastic performance problems, same behavior with the two unit I have tested (but the disappearing ssd just was present on the 1st unit, the removed a switch it had, as some of you mentioned on this thread- 

 

the Gen 4 on a 7760 and 7560 I have get hot with the OEM samsung 2TB drives.  Not has hot as yours (most I have seen is 70 degrees C).  I think it is the design.  

 

Do you have the disappearing drive issue and is that with or without the drive switch on the MB?

[Aaron44126]

4 hours ago, Rinconmike said:

I think it is the design.

 

It does make sense that the PCIe4 drive would run hot.  There's basically nothing there to cool it off...

[razibus]

I have a random issue with the power button, it does not work to shut down the computer. It always work to switch on the computer, but from time to time it does not work for shutting down the computer. In that case, I have to do from windows start menu. It is not a big deal, but I am just wondering if I should investigate this further in case it is a sign of a bigger failure coming and if anybody has the same issue.

[Aaron44126]

5 hours ago, razibus said:

I have a random issue with the power button, it does not work to shut down the computer. It always work to switch on the computer, but from time to time it does not work for shutting down the computer. In that case, I have to do from windows start menu. It is not a big deal, but I am just wondering if I should investigate this further in case it is a sign of a bigger failure coming and if anybody has the same issue.

Do you have the fingerprint reader that integrates into the power button?  I have noticed that in this case, the power button function is disabled while you are at the lock screen.  I guess it is to keep you from accidentally pressing it while trying to just have your fingerprint scanned.  The power button works when the system is unlocked.

[razibus]

Yes, I do have the fingerprint reader. However, the computer was unlock every time. So something else was holding the computer from powering off. (and it could have been the fingerprint reader indeed)

[Brian Lawton]

Heads-up that Dell has re-released BIOS v1.11.0 today. As far as I can tell, there's nothing new since they first released it several weeks ago before pulling it after a few days.

[Aaron44126]

11 minutes ago, Brian Lawton said:

Heads-up that Dell has re-released BIOS v1.11.0 today. As far as I can tell, there's nothing new since they first released it several weeks ago before pulling it after a few days.

 

I can confirm that it's exactly the same file as before.

[Rinconmike]

On 6/13/2022 at 8:10 AM, Brian Lawton said:

Heads-up that Dell has re-released BIOS v1.11.0 today. As far as I can tell, there's nothing new since they first released it several weeks ago before pulling it after a few days.

 

On 6/13/2022 at 8:22 AM, Aaron44126 said:

 

I can confirm that it's exactly the same file as before.

 

They also have 1.10.1 listed in the previous versions.  When they pulled 1.11.0 they also pull the 1.10.1 so the only one that was available was 1.5.0.  Now you can get both 1.11.0 and 1.10.1. 

 

I am still on 1.10.1 which I updated before they pulled it previously.

 

[alittleteapot]

I just completed a top to bottom refurbishment of my 7760.  This was critical because I was having some heat-related bluescreens, and I think the fans were always going max speed.  Usually, I'd see 15-13 degrees "core distance to tjMax" (the headroom before hard CPU throttling) when I ran HWINFO64, even when it wasn't doing that much.  So, I backed up everything, and then detached the backplate.  After one year of running in a home office, the fans were almost caked with dust - which is nothing that a few minutes with a can of compressed air couldn't fix.  Once I reattached the backplate, the laptop is back to normal temps and running completely silent again.  I also re-did the filesystem and decided against using storage spaces in any way, shape, or form.  Instead of 9 VMs running on a single storage spaces pool (equivalent to RAID1+0), I simply distributed them across the three data drives.  KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid, but I personally am the biggest offender of this principal just because I like to try new things and have fun 🙂

 

 

[Aaron44126]

32 minutes ago, alittleteapot said:

After one year of running in a home office, the fans were almost caked with dust

 

I have also noticed that dusty fans definitely impact cooling performance.  it's probably worse if the fans are running constantly.  (...People who run light office workloads a lot of the time probably have the fans off more than they are on.)  I have set myself an alert to clean the fans out every four months.

 

32 minutes ago, alittleteapot said:

I also re-did the filesystem and decided against using storage spaces in any way, shape, or form.

 

I'm also using Storage Spaces on my M6700.  It works but it has its oddities for sure, especially if you use it with ReFS and/or multiple volumes.  (It seems very hard to convince it to free up space in the pool from the volumes sometimes, if you have deleted files or moved stuff from one volume to another.)  On my inbound 7770 I am planning to ditch Storage Spaces and just try using the Intel Rapid Storage RAID, with all of the drives (aside from the OS drive) in a giant RAID 0 array.

[RockoDesvan]

On 6/10/2022 at 4:50 AM, Rinconmike said:

the Gen 4 on a 7760 and 7560 I have get hot with the OEM samsung 2TB drives.  Not has hot as yours (most I have seen is 70 degrees C).  I think it is the design.  

 

Do you have the disappearing drive issue and is that with or without the drive switch on the MB?
 

I only had the disappearing drive issue with the MB that had the switch. With the last 7760 I received (the one without the drive switch), I don't have that issue, just the heat one.

[razibus]

I just realized my 7760 does not go in sleep mode. Indeed, the screen turns off but the rest seems to keep working as normal and the screen immediately turns on if I move the mouse for example. Also, the command powercfg -lastwake returns Wake History Count - 0. I was not able to pinpoint the issue, and I was wondering if any of you has the same issue.

[SvenC]

6 hours ago, razibus said:

I just realized my 7760 does not go in sleep mode. Indeed, the screen turns off but the rest seems to keep working as normal and the screen immediately turns on if I move the mouse for example. Also, the command powercfg -lastwake returns Wake History Count - 0. I was not able to pinpoint the issue, and I was wondering if any of you has the same issue.

 

Had that once on my 7740 and checked the Windows application event log to find an event that some device did not react properly to the suspend command. The name indicated the smart card reader. Restarting the smartcard service solved it for me. So maybe the eventlog has some helpful information for you as well?

[razibus]

12 hours ago, SvenC said:

 

Had that once on my 7740 and checked the Windows application event log to find an event that some device did not react properly to the suspend command. The name indicated the smart card reader. Restarting the smartcard service solved it for me. So maybe the eventlog has some helpful information for you as well?

If you are referring to administrative events, there is nothing remarkable. I disabled the smartcard, but it did not make any difference. I am starting to wonder if it is a normal behavior from Standby S0.

[Aaron44126]

1 hour ago, razibus said:

If you are referring to administrative events, there is nothing remarkable. I disabled the smartcard, but it did not make any difference. I am starting to wonder if it is a normal behavior from Standby S0.

 

So, it is "modern standby" and not S3 sleep like prior systems have.  Do the fans operate while it is "asleep"?  Does it look like the system is still doing things in the background (i.e. generating Windows event log entries)?

 

I have not messed with "modern standby" myself, I always use hibernate in the odd case that I need to drive somewhere with the laptop.  But I have heard a lot of complaints about "modern standby" and wishes that S3 sleep would also be supported...

[SvenC]

1 hour ago, razibus said:

If you are referring to administrative events, there is nothing remarkable. I disabled the smartcard, but it did not make any difference. I am starting to wonder if it is a normal behavior from Standby S0.

I think I found it in Windows logs > Application.

 

But maybe its more related to this modern standby thing...

[razibus]

1 hour ago, SvenC said:

I think I found it in Windows logs > Application.

 

But maybe its more related to this modern standby thing...

Ok, thanks. I confirm there is not much going on which seems to be related.

 

2 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

So, it is "modern standby" and not S3 sleep like prior systems have.  Do the fans operate while it is "asleep"?  Does it look like the system is still doing things in the background (i.e. generating Windows event log entries)?

 

I have not messed with "modern standby" myself, I always use hibernate in the odd case that I need to drive somewhere with the laptop.  But I have heard a lot of complaints about "modern standby" and wishes that S3 sleep would also be supported...

The fans almost never operate on my computer, so hard to say. It seems the system is working in the background. For example, if Facebook is launched in Firefox and a message arrives, I can hear the sound of it. Based on Techrepublic description, it looks like a normal behavior: "At S0 the computer is in a Working power state and the system is fully operational. Even so, certain devices that are not currently being used can enter into a low power state to save power." That is why it takes milliseconds to go out of this mode. I am still confused by the result of the command powercfg -lastwake. Maybe S0 is not considered as a sleep mode by this command?

 

I am with you, and I would prefer S3. I am going to switch to hibernate or just turn off the computer. Maybe I am too old, but I don't see the advantage for me to use S0.

[Aaron44126]

24 minutes ago, razibus said:

Maybe I am too old, but I don't see the advantage for me to use S0.

 

I agree.  S3 is nice because the system doesn't consume much power (...could last on battery for multiple days...) and yet it wakes in a few seconds with everything still running where it left off.  This modern/S0 kind of sits at a "what's the point?" level to me.