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 HrilL on 12/3/2009 4:18:18 PM , Rating: 2

Yeah Maxtor used to have the worst drives but then seagate bought them and they then turned into maxtor. Their drives seem to be crap now days unless you're getting a 300GB 15K SAS or fiber channel. For SATA Western digital is the only way to go imo. Have had 4 200GB I replaced about a year ago that ran for 5-6 years none stop without any problems. I just wanted more space and wanted to move to SATA from EIDE they did get louder over time but that's to be expected when they're running 24/7 for 5 years and they're not rated for 24/7 operation.

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RE: Dell is the new Compaq

By jonmcc33 on 12/4/2009 9:44:09 AM , Rating: 1

I prefer Samsung myself. I had 3 Seagate 320GB drives that I replaced with a single 1TB Samsung F1. I was so pleased with that drive that I got another. The only Seagate left was a 500GB DB35 and it started showing some reliability issues and SMART errors. So I got a 1.5TB Samsung F2 to replace it.

If it wasn't for Samsung I would have went with Western Digital again.

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