DailyTech - Dell Goes Patch Crazy to Fix Its Overheating Laptops

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Gadgets Dell Goes Patch Crazy to Fix Its Overheating Laptops
Jason Mick (Blog) - December 3, 2009 9:04 AM

39 comment(s) - last by etrading59.. on Dec 7 at 8:40 AM

Dell has issued a fix for overheating and underclocking issues on its Latitude line of notebooks. (Source: Notebook Check)

Patches appear to solve many of the affected machines' crippling problems

Overheating problems in mobile electronics are hardly new territory, but they're always unpleasant to say the least. Thus when news broke earlier this week that some users' Dell Latitude E6400 and E6500 (as well as select XPS notebooks) were overheating and underclocking, many were frustrated.

While Dell's initial tactics involved banning at least one vocal member of the support forum who was detailing the problem, the company also was hard at work on patches to try to fix it. The fruits of that endeavor have now been realized, with Dell pushing out a plethora of patches according to users.

The patched BIOS seem to prevent the machines from experiencing their heating issues and from underclocking the CPU down to as low as 100 MHz. They also remedy unpleasant noises coming from the Seagate hard drives installed in some units. The hard drive issue appears to be a similar problem to the one MacBook Pro owners were complaining about earlier in the year.

While the Latitude series got some TLC, the Studio XPS 1645's issues still remain unsolved. Dell is shipping users new AC power adapters if they call and complain. It now appears the Alienware m15x may be having problems as well.

For now Dell has fixed the overheating problems for most, but some are still left to deal with the issues.

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RE: Dell is the new Compaq

By marvdmartian on 12/3/2009 10:27:49 AM , Rating: 5

More likely, pay your management people too much, your real workers not enough, and skimp on research & development. Who cares about the end product, so long as the CEO gets a big bonus for Christmas??

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RE: Dell is the new Compaq

By IcePickFreak on 12/3/2009 12:03:32 PM , Rating: 5

Sadly this is about it. A lot of companies are run totally by the sales portion of the company these days rather than the production/engineering half. The result being the only thing taken into consideration is the bottom line $. Engineering's only function becomes cost savings - no innovation, no build quality, etc.

I tend to look at sales guys as wanna-be senators & congressmen. The only thing they can do is BS, which in effect means they can do anything and everything - need a Space Shuttle by next week Friday? Not a problem!

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