E6540 Owners Thread

I have worked on hundreds of laptops, but the advice is always welcome.

Thanks.

 

Well, as much as it pains me I'm done trying to deal with Dell at this point. I ended up buying a Zbook, which is funny because I have hated on HP's for as long as I have loved on the Dells. If by some miracle Dell ends up coming back to me before I sell the E6540 then great.

 

I'm sorry to hear it, veekay. Feel free to tell me about the Zbook sometime. If I didn't have a small fortune in Dell AC adapters and docking stations, I might have done the same.

 

I'm in the same boat and will certainly miss not being able to use my adapters and docks.

 

Sad to hear that Dell completely ignored you in the end veekay. Keep us updated with the ZBook, I'm interested to see how it will compare to the Precisions.

 

overheating and throttling in this machine might be due to dell not putting thermal paste on the cpu. in my e6440 with i7 4600m. my cpu maxed 99c on load. I added a 4702mq to my surprise. there was no paste on the thermal pad. so after swapping to a quad cpu with no options allowed on my model. my temps in the same scenario dropped from 78-85. and that's from a dual core to a quad core.
I did think well it must be dells laptops design. but now im thinking its just a shortcut on the production line. weirdly my graphics did have paste on. my laptop use to idle around 55c. now it idles between 37-42c. I would recommend checking yours. I use ic diamond paste. doesn't need to be run in.

 

All of mine had no real paste since they used the pads, but I replaced each one with AS5 and of course it didn't help - as the rest of us know, the thing is just badly designed.

 

Can't believe it took me 6 months to find this thread/forum.

I WANT to love my E6540, I really do. Performance-wise, it should be like manna from Heaven compared to my old, trusty, and rock-solid D830 (of which I have owned and supported many, many units).

And in most respects it is... but not really.

I found this thread because I finally got fed up with my thighs getting cooked every time I used my laptop for more than a few minutes at a time. It's a in' laptop, and I can't use it in my lap.

I read every post in this thread after Googling for "E6540 hot"...

I have the SAME exact thermal issues as outlined in detail in this thread. I am loathe to pursue this with Dell, because I have already been through 1) weeks of BS support issues simply trying to get the laptop delivered to me on initial sale, 2) weeks of phone, email, and forum support run-around trying to get the Intel 6300 Wireless Card to work properly, which BTW, and I finally returned for a refund after having exchanged for replacement TWICE at DELL'S suggestion.

I have been a "Dell Shop" guy for a really long, long time. In my almost 30 years now of IS/IT industry experience, I have worked in IBM, HP, and Dell shops, and when I went private, I stuck with Dell and put all my clients/companies in Dell equipment.

Then, I took a couple of years off, and when I went back to it, it's like Dell became a totally different company.... Tech Support sucks, customer service sucks, and now, I have definitive proof that the product design has suffered tremendously.

Anyway, I'm just too in' tired to fight with them anymore, so when my new Intel 7260 (dual AC) + BT 4.0 card arrives today, and I go through the (hopefully not a total in nightmare) process of installing it, I am going to take some time to analyze and try to figure out some mitigating solution for the sub-standard thermal design.

Once upon a time, I spent a great deal of time working in computing thermal design. Anything is better than banging my head against the Dell UN-Support Wall again.

 

Is anyone else having trouble with USB 3 devices dropping offline in the middle of a large file copy? I've had this happen multiple times with my E6540. At first I thought it was an inadequate USB power supply issue when attached to a small external USB 3 HDD, but it's dropping USB 3.0 thumb drives off line as well. I've tried the back "high power" port and the side ports, and have the same issue. I don't seem to have this problem with USB 2.0 devices in the USB 3 ports. Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit.

 

How large are we talking? Is it only in windows or have you tried outside of windows? I have made a few backups of my whole system (100gb+) to usb3 drives without issue both within windows and outside of it.