Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

It's unlikely they will be interchangeable. Compare the photos and illustrations in the manuals.

You can see a photo of the XPS15 9550's 3 cell battery here. (The XPS15 9550 is basically the same hardware as the Precision M5510).

You will also need a hard drive cable or the complete kit for holding the drive in place (optional for an SSD which is less sensitive to movement than an HDD).

John

 

Precision 5510 1.2.16 BIOS released today. "Fix Dell Thunderbolt Dock issue".

I wonder if it fixes anything else? Dell says it is optional.

John

 

I am going to hold off updating to the latest bios after those terrible battery issues with 1.2.13, that should have never happened, and until there's confirmation of stability on 1.2.16, I wont install.

 

I decided to give it a try and it doesn't appear to have broken anything. The battery won't recharge unless the charge level is below 92%, but maybe that was the situation previously - I'm using the Adaptive charging setting. I've encountered that type of charging rule on many notebooks as it avoids frequent top-up charging which increases the battery wear. You can also keep an eye on this XPS15 9550 thread to see if any issues get reported.

There is also a new version of the Intel(R) Management Engine Components Installer:
Fixes:
- Enhanced power transition
Enhancements
- Improved system stability
which I have tried and it seems to be a bit buggy as it throws an error at the end but still appears to install. Perhaps there's something it wants to install which isn't relevant to my hard configuration.

John

 

Installed bios last night and intel update just now. both went fine - no errors.

 

Received, everything works so far, but it's rather slow so I'm going to do clean install. Are any of the Dell specific uitilities useful? Or should I ignore all of them when installing drivers. Anything critical I need to still make use of the warranty and customer support?

 

Your 5510 should not be slow in normal usage. My 5510 takes its time to get to the BIOS screen (I think it is searching for connected hardware) but once that far is quick to boot. Before contemplating a clean install of Windows you should make sure all the drivers and firmware are up to date. You can get all these by entering your service tag (under the flap on the bottom) into the Dell support website. You should start with the BIOS and Thunderbolt firmware then the other chipset drivers, followed by the other drivers. If in doubt, try installing them all - the softwarewill show if any driver is already installed. As for the Dell utilities: the Power Manager (which you have to search for) provides access to some different battery charging options and offers some differet cooling policies (which seem to make no difference). You might want to look at the Precision Optimizer - I recall looking but then uninstalled it.

 

Yes, I thought it was weird too when I was doing some initial digging around on the laptop it would start to lag pretty noticeably. There was almost 144 processes running the first time I turned it on causing about 30% memory usage with no user apps opened. I've reformatted and clean installed windows, but left the Dell recovery partition alone. Runs smoothly now with only 30 processes tinkering in the background and virtually no memory usage after clean install=D My suspicion is a combination of those Dell things may have been conspiring against me.

of course now I've run into a different problem which is I can't run .bat files Im hoping one of these windows updates that will get installed will fix that nonsense since none of the Registry or cmnd solutions I've seen posted on the Internet work.

 

Windows does a lot of one-off housekeeping tasks when it first gets used so you may find those still come to life when you turn your back. I would have personally left the computer for a while and also tried to figure out what was loading the CPU before considering a re-installation.

Regarding the .bat problem, what about this or this?

John

 

The bat problem i have is that they just open as notepad files and i cant seem to change the association. Register keys that internet tells me to modify dont exist.


Hmmmah the intel p530 video driver from the dell website is incompatible. Thats odd i thought the service tag was specific to my machine. Also, I cant get windows update to work because of windows update error 80072ee2. The solutions I've found for this error dont seem to work regarding the deletion of 2 register keys because i dont have those keys already. Perplexing. I wonder if the lack of compatible video driver is related to some windows 7 update i need first.