Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

John. I talked to the dell support and like you, they are sending over a new motherboard. It appears it had to do with the latest BIOS 1.2.13. I am having second thoughts now on the quality of the 5510. This will be my second mother board replacement so far in 3 months. I also had a SSD failure as well on this machine.

I might be looking for another machine next year when the the 1 year hardware warranty
ends and we face hardware failures like this

 

For those that have the NVMe SSD drive can you let me know what write speed you are getting? I used the PC Benchmark on Windows 10 to compute this and seems low to me. My older latop without the NVMe SSD is 2x faster on the write but much lower on the read.

http://screencast.com/t/XhJsiLu4

http://screencast.com/t/kSDBSGohKxI

 

My crystaldiskmark 5.1.2x64
Seq read 32T1 2208 write 1531
4K read 32T1 596 write 426
Seq read 1571 write 1511
4K read 50.51 write 171.08
toshiba 512 SSD, battery only

 

Thanks for those numbers.Mine. is slightly slower than what you had. I was expecting faster, but I guess all is good.

http://screencast.com/t/CIv5ioKnzpS

 

I use the "DELL Command Update" utility. It finds updates and installs them in required sequence.

http://screencast.com/t/GuV1pExgv

 

I personally use the website as I don't like having Dell's software potentially lurking in the background on my computer at all times. That being said, I think precision optimizer might have some settings where you tell it the kinds of updates you'd like to receive, so it's possible you haven't elected to get non-essential updates etc. There's another program called Dell Commander, and I believe that one is more focused on updates whereas in Precision Optimizer updates are more of a secondary feature. So if you want to use Dell's software, you might want to try Commander.

 

It could potentially be an issue with the sensor that tells it when the screen hinge is open/closed or with the power button hardware. That would explain why a motherboard replacement didn't fix it, and it could also explain the laptop waking up while it's closed in transit.

 

If you got it from the Dell webpage, and you verify that it has a valid Dell certificate in the Windows UAC pop-up that comes up, you sound be ok. I imagine that Dell uses a hardware based signature check before updating the BIOS, so that would mean it would be very difficult to even intentionally install malware, but I am not certain of that. I would be interested if anyone knows about that.

 

Commend update worked. Get tips thanks.

 

I was phoned yesterday by the Dell support person who had arranged the repair. He said that a further BIOS update is in the pipeline.

I think that the 5510 is basically OK but they need to sort out the Thunderbolt-related bugs. I had the crash on resume from sleep problem with the new board (updated to the BIOS one version before the latest). I then applied the latest Thunderbolt firmware update and haven't seen any further problems.

John