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 Alexvrb on 12/5/2009 4:35:54 PM , Rating: 2

Yeah except that AMD is very competitive in budget laptops. Budget laptops don't have discrete graphics. Most of the cheaper Intel laptops use Intel chipsets. Therefore, a cheap AMD laptop is a better performer with regards to graphics. In the entry level laptop market, I'd take a Radeon 3100/4100 or 3200/4200 over the GMA4500 series any day. Even the GMA4500MHD falls significantly behind a 3100.

This is important if you're buying an inexpensive first laptop for a teen, who might be playing some games at low settings on it. Keeps them off the more powerful machine so you can hog it, anyway.

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