D630 Owners Thread

Keep an eye on the temperatures during normal usage, and if you want to dive deeper, remove the heatsink and check the part # stamped on the GPU. A revised GPU (if I remember correctly, the new one is 620-A2, and the old one is 620-A0) is now standard on refurbished motherboards, but I'm not sure when it was released.

While you've got the laptop open, change the thermal grease on the CPU and bend down the GPU arm to make sure it makes good contact (I had overheating problems in a D630 because of that...thermal pad wasn't pressed all the way down). If the thermal pad on the GPU is a blue one like the one for the chipset, have Dell replace the heatsink with a new one (which will come with a better thermal pad).

However, if you're already having parts dispatched, you might as well get the motherboard replaced just to have peace-of-mind...

 

Thanks for that info - for now I'm holding fire with regards to carrying out any upgrades of the internal components (other than the HDD, which I've swapped out already) until the warranty transfer goes through with Dell UK.

Once that's done I'll kick off the internal upgrades along with checking out the CPU & the GPU as you've suggested - one thing that I do need to get fixed though is the screen, as I've found a couple of scratches on it along with a few dead pixels (you only really notice them with a bright desktop wallpaper is applied i.e. white).

Knock on wood though it's all looking very good and I've already got an order in for a secondary battery for it plus I'll be placing an order this week for a 2nd HDD Caddy from NewmodeUS - thought I'd might as well get a reliable bit of kit for the 750GB HDD that will be bundled with it, as the cheap caddies I've tried so far haven't been that great.

 

Cheers mate - it was just the luck of the draw this time! ;-)

 

I've been back on my D630 as a daily driver for a few months now. I never quite got the whole "dim screen" ranting until using it on a daily basis after my e6420 sold: man is this thing dim, I pretty much have to have it on Max brightness.

If anyone's curious about the windows 8 consumer preview, it runs fine on my Intel graphics equipped D630. If the mouse pointer doesn't appear upon your first boot, there's an easy fix:

1. Hit the windows logo key to make sure your at the start screen.

2. Type "mouse"

3. In the sidebar, arrow down to settings than hit enter

4. Arrow to "mouse" and hit enter.

You'll be switched to the desktop for the rest of the instructions

5. Tab over (or attempt to highlight with the invisible pointer) to the pointers tab. Hit enter if you used the keyboard to select the tab.

6. Hit tab to select the pointer types box: arrow down to choose any other pointer style.

7. Hit enter.

From there you shoud have a visible mouse pointer. You can change back to the standard Aero pointer without issue. I encountered this when I upgraded in place from windows 7 pro x64. Your mileage may vary.

Overall the experience has been great and the high resolution screen option allows me to run apps docked which has proven quite addicting.

Anyways just a tip and thoughts about my return to "old reliable."

 

Thanks for that post, as I was considering installing it (W8) myself onto my D630 (nVIDIA) as well to try it out.

 

Anyone had any flash video issues with their D630 under Windows 7?

I have an intel graphics model with 4 gigs ram and T9500 cpu. Sometimes when viewing flash videos the whole machine will freeze up. You can still hear the audio from the flash video file. If you press control-alt-del you can logoff and back on to fix it. Trying to bring up the task manager doesn't do anything.

Happens with Chrome and Firefox (haven't tested with IE at all). I have uninstalled and reinstalled both browsers and Flash components with the same results. Its really sporadic. It happens maybe once a week or so. Windows 7 is up to date with all driver and updates.

I didn't notice this happening until I upgraded the cpu from a T7800 cpu to the T9500. However I did upgrade the cpu just a couple weeks after purchasing the machine so it might not be related. Monitoring the temps and the cpu cores rarely break 40c, so I don't think its heat related. I have briefly booted the machine off Linux cd's and haven't seen the lock ups in flash video, but I haven't extensively tested it.


I am leaning towards a software issue of some kind. Video and audio drivers are the most current that I could find.

Thoughts?

 

I've experienced this before along with a similar issue: In Windows 7, the desktop window manager locks up causing whatever was on screen to "freeze".

The system is still responsive under the frozen image (I could click on things and see the HDD light react appropriately) but there was nothing I could do to make the frozen screen go away besides wait for the DWM to crash out.

Switching to Classic fixed that and I've had no such issues since moving to Windows 8.

I'm trying to recall if I've had the flash video problem in Windows 8 and honestly I want to say maybe once....It's rare.

Flash and the D630 is an annoying mix because IIRC the X3100 graphics are just old enough so that hardware acceleration doesn't function. I notice the machine getting noticibly hotter/fan kicking on when I'm watching something as simple as a youtube video.

 

just wanted to jump on quickly to report my experience with an OCZ Agility3 SSD. From other posts and websites, I had feared that speeds would be limited to SATA1 - 150 mb/s, but I'm getting a solid read speed of 280 mb/s verified using Disk Utility benchmark on Zorin/Ubuntu.

My boot time after bios is 25 seconds, vs 50 with 120gb stock HDD.

Very pleased to be getting SATA2 speeds.

For others using Linux, there are a few tweaks for SSDs that you should do to keep your SSD running at peak performance, specifically: enable TRIM, disable swap, and move /tmp to your RAM. a few resources i used:

Solid State Drives and Linux
How to Tweak Your SSD in Ubuntu for Better Performance - How-To Geek

Recommended upgrade.

(update: using A18 bios, and 2.15 OCZ firmware, AHCI)

 

This is pretty much exactly it. I might try playing with Win 7 classic, however I am downloading the Win 8 Consumer preview and might give that a go.

 

Happens here on Win7, X3100 video, Latitude D830. I find that I have to cycle through the 3 monitors I have connected to the laptop (using Fn+F8) in order to get the driver to reset itself and clear the problem.

Task Manager doesn't do anything. Have tried the Win8 developer preview and it seems to be immune.

Seems to happen somewhat more if I am running in dual monitor mode, compared to just the single (built-in) laptop screen.

The Nvidia video had a worse crashing problem, as I own D830's with both specs (and I have a D630, but its user *never* watches flash videos).