Hands on Dell Precision 7710

Any reviews on the 4k screen?

 

BSODs on my 6700 in the last two years: 0
BSODs on my 7710 in the last two hours: 3

I believe it might be prudent for those that have not purchased a 7710 to hold off for a while...

 

Which device/driver was tripping the error? i.e. network card, video, etc?

 

Intel's graphics drivers?

 

May very well be all caused by the same thing. Bluescreenview (http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html) or Whocrashed (http://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed) are useful for figuring out what caused your BSOD.

 

On windows 8.1, I have had 3 times where the computer was unresponsive. keyboard backlight on, but screen would not show anything (LED obviously ON).

In logs I found weird things about CPU cores to be shut down one by one. did not find out what caused it, but it suggested to update firmware to fix.

I switched to windows 10, did not get this issue so far.

Also, the wifi is driver is also lacking. it would not pair to a bluetooth headphone and I cannot connect in a stable maneer to my huawei 4G dongle.

Product is very new, so I understand drivers are not ultra stable.

 

BSODs were caused by crappy chipset drivers for Win 10 and their incompatibility with a slew of USB sticks (thumb drives) and USB data cables (phones, cameras. etc).

Error was: BAD_POOL_HEADER

Also, the M.2 drives used in these are literally the bottom of the barrel, slowest most unreliable drives of all the M.2 drives out. A lot of ppl are getting slower than 7200 PRM mechanical drive speeds.

I tried to do a system back up to a USB thumb drive and it failed half way through, which somehow corrupted the MBR on the drive. I tried doing a restore from the USB stick DELL sent, but as you can probably already guess, the USB stick DELL sent is among the ones not fully supported by the chipset drivers... Laptop is now unbootable and I already have a return initiated.

I am trading it in for one with Win 7 Pro and dumping Win 10... maybe Win 11 will be as good as Win 7 was/is, but not holding my breath.

 

Dell's images and drivers don't help. Doing a clean install has been my M/O when buying a laptop for years, and I still highly recommend it. The only nice thing I can say about the Dell preinstalled Windows images is that almost everyone else's are even worse.

Sadly, these machines are new enough that some drivers aren't on Windows Update yet (heck, true even for the last-gen ones, which is inexplicable) but you can get the majority if the way there and be very selective with the drivers you add.

 

I'll hold out for a few more months before purchasing until drivers, bios updates catch-up and the systems becomes a bit more stable.

 

I've found HPs images to be stable, especially in their ZBook series.

I normally do a clean install too but I just flat out do not have time for this stuff any more. I am a professional designer that works literally 60 to 70 hours a week so I am rather disappointed that a 4000 USD laptop is such a POS out of the box.

This is becoming typical for so-called high end products though... have you driven any new cars lately? Basically all plastic junk.