Latitude 7450 Owners' Thread

Well that sounds good, I need the extra storage since my e7450 currently only has 160 gb. But you are right, a SSD should be my first upgrade as soon as I can afford one.

As for the mouse lag: I did what you said and in notepad if i hold down any characted I can see it the same kind of super short lag, and what's interesting is that the spacing between the lag spikes seem to be the exact same over and over again. Tried the same test on my old Lenovo and there the characters flow smoothly.

The mouse issue happens with the trackpad and with my cordless mouse (both when connected and not connected)

I ran dpclat for a few minutes, I dont really know what to look for so I took a screenshot



Thanks again for all the help

 

It's behaving OK for me but that's not to say that it's 100% OK. However, any driver issues for the Intel graphics will affect all notebooks using the same Intel GPU.

However, if you value having a quiet computer then I would recommend that you look out for the version of the E7450 with the Nvidia GPU, if only to get the benefit of a much better engineered fan. Unfortunately, this also limits your storage options to mSATA.

The dpclat graph is very similar to what I get on my E7450 without any horrible spikes into the red zone that would indicate significant latency problems.

It therefore appears that your lags are something that affect keyboard and pointing device inputs. I would start by reinstalling the mouse driver offered by Dell. Then read this thread in the Dell support forum - there might be a hardware problem.

John

 

Thanks. I don't really know why, but the Nvidia option is not available in my country. Intel only here.

 

For reasons best known to Dell, the Nvidia version isn't easy to find. I was lucky that this configuration has started to show up in the Dell UK Outlet. The alternative is to phone Dell sales in your country.

John

 

Different subject: What to do with the empty WWAN slot? If you would like WWAN capability but don't want the cost of the WWAN card that Dell offers for the E7450 then there is an alternative. The previous generation 5570 card is available in M.2 format as the 5570e and is marketed as for the Venue tablet and is somewhat more affordable. I applied the old proverb "nothing ventured, nothing gained" and bought the 5570e plus a 200MB 4G SIM. The card went into slot without any hesitation but I had to find a screw (2Mx3, I think) from my bag of assorted notebook screws (available off ebay) to fix it down. However, fixing the antennae cables was challenging and needed a small pair of pliers to bend, rotate and align the plug on each cable to the appropriate socket on the card (white cable to main, black cable to aux) before pushing plug into socket. The cables came with plastic covers over the ends and I taped these onto the WWAN card as somewhere to keep them in case I ever want to remove the card.

The next step is to install the driver: Windows 10 has the driver but not the supporting software. Don't use the WWAN card driver offered for the E7450 (it doesn't work - I tried it) but get the 5570e driver for the Venue from here. Speedtest only measured a download speed of 5Mb/s which isn't really 4G but the problem more likely lies with the network provider than the hardware.

John

 

Hi,

I've had more time with the laptop today and I noticed that these small lags are not exclusive to keyboard/mouse inputs. Below is an attached image, the green bar that moves from left to right even lags at evenly spaced intervals. Any more ideas what it could be? I'm thinking about re-installing drivers but I don't know if I should re-install video or kb/mouse drivers. I don't think the kb/mouse drivers would help since as stated above, the lag is not limited to them.

 

LatencyMon is another latency checking program and has more functionality than dpclat. It might be able to lead you to the problem software or driver. You can also temporarily disable hardware in Device Manager to see if that helps. But first, is the frequency of the big red spikes in dpclat approximately similar to the frequency of the keyboard / mouse lag problems?

The solution to your problems might also lie in the E7450 BIOS. If you haven't been there then it's well worth a visit. If your E7450 includes hardware that you never use then it may help to disable it so drivers or software don't use time and resources periodically talking to it.

John

 

Hi,

I did a clean install of Windows 10 last night and so far everything seems to be working much smoother. No mouse/keyboard lags and scrolling in Chrome seems smoother as well. Maybe it was some kind of driver conflict?

Will report back if it starts happening again.

Thanks again for all your help!

 

Can someone confirm that the wwan spot cannot be used for an m.2/msata and this laptop is restricted to one drive?

 

Also wondering this, I only got up to page 8 and it was only 1 drive at the time. Did you guys like the e7440 better? Anyone ever see the nvidia option on the dell us outlet site?