After two months with my 3rd E6400 I am officially DONE with Dell Latitudes

I don't think it's the design of the dock, but maybe some sort of firmware/bios issue when docked. If you look over the laptop and then while it's in the dock, you'll see there is actually more air space under the bottom vent when it is docked.

I had an M2400 with the Quadro 370 (same as the E6400 with a faster GPU) and it ran the fan hard at times too, but I updated it to the newest BIOS and the problem has gone away.

I have purchased quite a few E6400s and E4300s with the Intel GPU's for work and they sit in docks all day and do not run the fans much if at all. I still wonder if most of these issues are caused by the Nvidia GPU saturating the heatsink. I know John mentioned the fans kick on to high as soon as the chipset reaches 50C.

 

I would agree that the culprit is probably the nVidia card.
Dell will simply not change the card and/or give me a refund.
Its very frustrating.

My fan goes on at 44/45.

 

45C seems much too low to me. I could have sworn some people here have gotten Dell to replace their Nvidia GPU's with Intel ones.

 

You would not believ how many hours i have spent on the phone with them over the past 8 months.
They refuse to downgrade; they keep sending me the same unit with the same nVidia card and I keep having the same problems.

 

Just remembered something. Doesn't Dell have some policy that basically says that if the computer is brought into service 3 times for the same problem and it is not fixed, you are entitled to a refund, regardless of how long ago you bought the computer? Try stating that you know of that policy as a fact - asking them about it won't get you very far.
I don't know what's so hard about giving you the Intel card. I would start screaming at them.

 

You have to start to get pushy with em...that's the only way once you've tried this hard with no results. Just don't lose your cool completely.

 

How do you recommend I get pushy?
What leverage do I have?

 

Well, you have had three replacements with them now. I'm using my 4th latitude as well, so I was able to get to recognize that fact. The issue was, that Dell customer support doesn't link together different Service Request #s even if they're under the same name...haha, so you have to manually tell them that or they won't know. So make it clear that your disappointed in dell, and you want this issue to be resolve as quickly as possible. They should send you over to a specialist...who can then either arrange for a (restocking fee waived) return or another exchange (with maybe an upgrade, I pushed them to make an exception to change to a different color).

 

You certainly have leverage.
1) You're a valuable customer. If they want to keep you that way (if you'll ever buy a dell again at this point), they can't just dump you in the garbage. You can either give them your money in the future or give it to the likes of Lenovo. They don't want that.
2) You'll dump mud on their name, at least here, if not anywhere else. If you go posting horror stories about your machine, people who are looking for opinions that are deciding between the trifecta of the E6400/T400/6930p will be quickly turned away from the Dell if they hear they can have these crap problems. They'll potentially loose lots of sales.

What I recommend you do is this.
a) Contact customer support again. One last time. Be very polite and nice, but aggressive and agitated at the same time. I find that this doesn't aggravate the support people but tells them that you're quite serious.
b) Fill out this form: https://support.dell.com/support/to...lcare/outstanding_issues_care?c=us&l=en&s=gen
c) Send an executive email carpet bomb (tutorial here), search the forums for a list of Dell exec emails (posted by Cin, I think).
d) Spread the message EVERYWHERE. this forum has enough, go to other forums. blogs. write a horrible review on Dell.com. everything you can think of. they have people that trawl the web to find dissatisfied customers and try to make it right.

They're SAVING MONEY by getting you an intel replacement. I don't know what they're doing??? It's NOT THAT HARD.

 

Thanks for the info; will do and will post the results tomorrow.