D830 Owner's Lounge

Repairable if you have some tinfoil, a screwdriver, some thermal paste, and an oven that can bake for 9 minutes at 400degF.

 

I thought only the D630's were affected by that.

 

The Nvidia issue is less prevalent in the D830 than the D630 (probably because of the better heatsink - many later models also have direct contact between the GPU and the heatsink), but the D830 is still afflicted.

 

Good to know, thanks.

 

Baked both my D830s back to life this week. The Nvidia Quadro 140M one suffered the GPU failure again. The Intel 965gm-only model was getting increasingly flaky, and refused to recognize the wireless card.

10 minutes @ 400degF, with the plastic pieces associated with the SmartCard reader shielded off by aluminium foil, seems to do the trick.

Each has somewhere around 20k hours, and ~4000 power cycles.

 

The bottom one of the two stacked USB connectors on the right side of my M4300/D830 is busted. On Ebay, there are many varieties of double-stacked USB connectors for sale and I am not sure which one to get.

From looking at motherboard pics I think this item 261238711746 might be it:

2pc Double Stacked Female PCB USB Jack Connector Port 2 0 8 Pins | eBay

Could anyone confirm or point me to the correct USB jack part number to get?

If I go through the trouble of removing the motherboard to solder the USB ports, would you recommend I proactively bake it for reflow? I have not experienced any nVidia issues so far. Would you recommend a copper shim for the nVidia quadro when I reassemble it all? Currently, the computer runs perfectly stably, but of course it is old.

Thanks!

 

If your motherboard has nvidia graphics you may want to consider just replacing the whole thing with an INTEL video motherboard.

 

My latest mod to the D830:



Basically, I used a Dremel tool to grind off some of the plastic on the underside of the palmrest/cover above the PCMCIA slot. And then taped an active GPS antenna to it (from ebay). The cover fit back on just fine, and I wired the active GPS antenna to the GPS port on a Sierra Wireless MC7700 populating the WWAN slot. With proper configuration of the MC7700, it can be directed to use the dedicated GPS antenna port and it seems to be able to pick up considerably more sattelites now (18-20 satellites usually, which is due to its ability to use Russian GLONASS if given an antenna on the GPS port).

The tape is Kapton (well actually a cheap Chinese knock-off, not the official du Pont stuff!) rated for the higher temperature environment of electronics.

Just a further note: you will lose the ability to use the PCMCIA slot. However, my 8 years of owning the D830/D630s, I've not used it once.

 

No, copper shims are useless. Save your pennies, and use thermal paste. When it dies, it dies, you can reflow it a couple times, but after a while, it gets to be more trouble than its worth.

 

Upgraded this week to Windows 10. Basically the key to stability is uninstalling substantially all of the Dell add-in stuff (ie: Quickset, ALPS drivers, etc.) and just letting it all run with the Windows 10 native stuff.

For the fact that its now an 8-year-old laptop, Windows 10 has basically given it a new lease on life.