D630 Owners Thread

sounds like exactly what happens to an NVS 135 before it dies. Both of the D630s I've seen die have done the exact same thing. They both made it 24 hours before totally failing.

 

My D630 worked fine for the time being but today I used it at a lecture for 30mins, lugged it around for an hour and started using it again at work. That was when it started displaying garbage again.
Being a laptop service technician, I diagnosed what was wrong at it seems the underside memory slot is faulty.
I have a 2GB Samsung PC2-5300 stick under the keyboard and a later-added 2GB Kingston PC2-6400 stick on the underside. When I ran memtest86+ 2.11, it started spewing errors almost right away. I removed the Kingston stick and the display was OK again, re-ran memtest, it too was OK. Replaced the Samsung stick with Kingston and re-ran memtest, unsurprisingly it was OK.

 

Both factory installed sticks of RAM in my D630 were deemed to be faulty. I just got the machine back from Dell a week ago. While the online chat agent said that it would need a new motherboard and new memory modules, the tech report just said that they replaced the memory modules only. Regardless, it's been rock solid like Latitudes are known for ever since.

 

My motherboard was replaced in less than 4 hours, going to pick it up tomorrow from the ASP

Edit:

O woe, o worry. Got my machine back last thursday, initally it was all good, the strangely low graphics performance (Vista graphics score 3,3, which bumped to 3,8) was fixed but another problem rose. Namely the thermal pad on the Quadro graphics had become kind of inefficient and when I stressed the graphics its temperature quickly rose to 99C and it started clocking itself down. Since the thermal pad can supposedly only replaced in the form of a new cooling system, so a new cooler was ordered from Dell and it should arrive any day now. Also, I'm getting the old and rather hot T7300 processor replaced with a cooler-running T8300. I wish I could've afforded the T9300 which was also available.
The reason for this woe was that I was supposed to take my lappy to a LANparty this weekend but needless to say, I couldn't because of the overheating issue, so I borrowed a Mitac 8224D barebone from work (2GHz T2450 + 256MB Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics) but it overheated the processor so the machine would shut down after ~2mins of gaming. Today I found out it too needed a cooling system change, which solved the problem.

E2:
Got the cooling exchanged and in the process had an upgrade to the T8300 processor, which runs helluva cooler than the old T7300. The screen hinges were shaky and the left one tended to creak after staying in one position for too long, so they also swapped out my display cover with hinges. Feels like a new life to this D630

 

SOMEBODY PLS HELP...

I formatted my hard disk on Latitude D630, re-installed Windows XP. But still does'nt start up smoothly sometimes. I get an error FATAL ERROR or SubSystem Failure. Err. comes in white text in blue background.
And i have re-start the laptop.

Does Windows XP or DELL Latitude some diagnostic utility to run tests on components or something...

What do i do ??

Pls. help...

 

You could try running Dell Diagnostics if that's still on your hard disk. To do this:

Make sure the computer's turned off.

Turn on the computer, when the Dell logo appears hit the F12 key on the keyboard

When the boot device list appears, highlight Diagnostics and press Enter

 

Anyone an answer to this? I like to mod my D630. I´m also having gpu heat issues.

 

I just turned my D620 into a D630 Frankenstein. I got an ATG D630 mobo cheap, and bought a T9300 off eBay. Also bought a base, but not the palm rest. I thought the D620 palm rest will fit fine, but it wasn't even close. ANyway I had to cut off a few plastics with the wire-cutter plier (thus the frankenstein), and it looks decent enough.

I'm still testing the T9300. What's the best software to see the temp? Can't wait to add 8GB ram.

 

Nice! Glad to see there are still a few people who visit this thread and haven't moved on to the E6400.

 

I was surprised to see this post resurface. Our D630 that was one of the last few sold new by Dell last spring just had the two 512MB memory sticks and the motherboard replaced last week. I was hoping that Dell ran out of 512MB sticks and was forced to used 1GB sticks, but no luck. Notebook is running good again with XP and our farm equipment diagnostic software that needs a serial port and not just any serial port adapter will work. I purchased the D630N that did not come with an OS. Man I wish I purchased two or three of those when they were still available. Much more compact than my D820 and they do not seem to suffer the same display problem as the D620 units did.