Hands on Dell Precision 7710

On the 7510, with TB16 dock, I have 2x 4K monitors working great at 60 Hz... No flickering or anything, and switchable graphics are enabled. It should be the same for the 7710, the machines share the same BIOS and architecture...
[Edit] Make sure that you have the latest BIOS.

 

So it looks like dell is going to be giving me an upgrade from the 6800 to the 7710 due to some display issues and service issues I was/am having. Can someone tell me if I can do just a simple drop in upgrade to the 4k screen and the backlit keyboard from the 1080p screen and non-backlit keyboard?

 

I can confirm that the non-backlit to backlit keyboard upgrade is a drop-in replacement. You can easily find keyboards on eBay, and some Latitude models use the same keyboard. Make sure you get an identical layout or the "plastic frame" around the keys may not fit.

Not sure about 4K, everything is eDP these days so it seems like it should be a drop-in replacement as well, but I haven't heard of anyone who has tried it.

 

I looked at pictures of the connector on the back of both panels and from what I can tell they look the exact same. Maybe someone will chime in if they've tried it.

thanks for the info on the keyboard. I had looked somewhere else initially and seen that dell used different motherboards for laptops that didn't ship with the backlit ones and that they didn't have the connector for it. It's good to know that isn't the case.

 

The keyboard swap is easy and a $20 ebay upgrade worth every penny. As mentioned make sure you order the right one by matching the bezels.

 

I had interesting experience today after upgrading to Windows 10 latest update (1703). ie WIndows 10 Creators. After the update I did the following.

I had 4 virtual machines running at once, all were on the same NVMe SSD 1TB drive. These four guest machines were each running windows 10 (pre creators version running Oracle and sql server databases). I initiated a windows update on all 4 at the same time. Each was given 10GB RAM, about 60 GB size, and 3 virtual cores. Probably not the wisest decision to do this all at once.

CPU on the host went to 100% andthey were all updating under a host running Win10 1703.

The laptop shutdown. I checked events and it said was because of possible power failure (I'm docked to eport with 240W psu). I rebooted the laptop and, and I did exact same again. I restarted each of the 4 VM guest. I restarted windows update in each. Same thing happened about 10 minutes later, just as before.

Event showed two critical events in past 24 hrs. Same error on both, times correlated with each crash.

I don't usually force updates amongst more than two virtual machines at once. But seems this shouldn't happen even if I wasn't wise to select to update these 4 at once. I suspect this is a Vmware issue and should be resolved sometime in future. So I'm not worried about it, although I did freakout at the time (cursing MS of course, thinking it was fault of my host update to 1703 earlier that morning). I don't know if problem is with Dell system BIOS issue with power draw reaching max, or if I had the dumb idea to update all at once and this is normal because of resources assigned vs resources available, or if soley because of recent 1703 update on my host, or if this is VMware issue being incompatible with latest MS Win 10 build 1703 resource issue. Anyways, I'm mentioning it here all the same. I suspect will be resolved in vmware update in future.

Everything is fine now as I updated each guest vm individually since then. I'm still on win 10 1703 and all is working (I did have to adjust a few Creators defaults to settings).

*edit: I apologize for my ramblings. I mention all of this incase others see the same thing and no other reason. And here is my only other gripe I had with Win10 Creators (this is my thread on MS Community Forum):
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...defender/e407f0f0-3060-4d84-af15-d02d83c1dd0e

 

Running the machine up to its limits

Did it blue screen or go black instantly?

My m6800 Hyper-V host (Win10 1703 as well) BSODed in the WLAN driver (Dell 1550 from broadcom) while 4 guests were pulling and installing Windows updates. One of them a domain controller. Very nice that its ActiveDirectory database survived the hard shutdown. Second update session was LAN connected and worked. Hard to tell if its purely the WLAN driver or how I used it with Hyper-V (created an internal switch which I shared my WLAN connection to).

Any body else with these corner case crashes?

 

We have M4800s that BSOD all of the time with the Dell WLAN driver. To get it stable, we have to roll back to an old WLAN driver from 2013, anything newer will BSOD under load on the WLAN. It's always a pain after a major Windows 10 update because it shoves a newer driver on you.

The working version I have is dated 6/2/2013 and the version number is 6.30.223.256, but I've done a fair amount of testing and it is pretty consistent: Anything 2013 and older works, anything 2014 and newer BSODs, and quickly if you have a lot of wireless traffic.

 

@SvenC @Aaron44126

It went straight to black, no blue screen. I have Intel AC-8260 and Intel I219-LM . I was using hardwired ethernet at the time, but the WIFI adapter was still enabled. VMware was using it's own bridged NIC adapters on each of the guests.

 

One of our 7710 just had BSOD SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED on nvlddmkm.sys (different 7710 than the one I posted about above).

I believe that is related to Nvidia. yes. I expected the driver to crash instead of BSOD. Switchable graphics was enabled on the laptop. I will check driver version and perhaps update it later today. That 7710 updated to new WIN10 1703 yesterday and prior to that he hasn't had a BSOD in about a year, so I'm suspicious of compatibility issues in new 1703 build with our two 7710. I may roll back to windows 1607 build if I get any other weird issues.