Latitude E7240 and E7440

A couple of days ago I joined the E7440 owners club having found a brand new one on ebay at Outlet pricing.

I'm still checking out the machine and I'm disturbed to discover that the new battery has nearly 8% wear. I've charged it to 100% then drained it to 3% then charged it up again to try to get it to reset the calibration but it's made no difference. My recent Samsung notebooks have had batteries which started life with the fully charged capacity being slightly above the design capacity.



Has anyone else received under capacity new batteries?

John

PS: I do like the low idle power drain ~3W on idle with minimum brightness and wireless devices disabled.

 

I have received a number of these directly from the outlet and the battery wear upon delivery usually ranged around 3-8%, so I don't think your is an outlier.

 

Hi, I prefer:
- LED backlit volume buttons (Mute, Vol+, Vol-)
- FP reader with LED indicator like in the Thinkpads
- dedicated Menu key button between AltGr and Right Ctrl

I really hope, they won't follow Lenovo and won't remove Touchpad dedicated buttons (this was the reason I've left Thinkpad T series after 10 years and using Dell Latitude E7440 since 2014.01, I'm sure I'm not the only one)

I have a few friends sent back X1 carbon Gen2. because of unusable touchpad and keyboard... Shame....
Regards

 

You sir are not the only one, I am not one of those that switched from Thinkpads, but I know people who did, some switched to Elitebooks, but the principle is the same.

 

I'm in process of changing the keyboard on my Latitude E7240 from non-backlit to backlit.

Good news is my unit appears to have the second edge connector socket for the backlit keyboard.

Bad news is the changeover process is not as easy as a YouTube video (can't find the link now) made it appear.

Could somebody link me a video (if it exists) of a step by step change over please? Would be eternally grateful

 

had anyone found a way to control the fan on these? At 5k rpm the noise is annoying. 4k rpm I can barely hear it. I'd actually be ok at 1k, 2k, 3k too. RIght now it's 0 rpm, then kicks in. I have the Dell enhanced power management and standard, quiet all do the same, cool and max level make the fan too loud. Thanks

 

That was a brand new battery and, since Dell wouldn't help me until I've got the computer registered in my name, I bought a second battery (also brand new). It's actually slightly worse than the first since the Fully Charged capacity is showing up as 43.926 Whr.

I'm starting to wonder if Dell is doing this by design because it avoids the part of the charging process (95 to 100% of design capacity) that can damage the chemistry. This will help to reduce the claims on the battery warranty. Another annoyance I have noticed is that a recharge cycle doesn't get initiated until the charge level drops to 90% of the Fully Charged value so one can't be sure of starting a battery session with a full charge.

This is on the Standard setting in Power Manager. I'll have to investigate whether other settings behave differently in this respect.

How are others finding their battery performance?

John

 

Regarding the charging not initiating until below 90%, check your bios. I vaguely remember a feature in the bios to preserve battery life and it had something to do with not charging until below 90% (or not charging above 90%?! Sorry don't remember it clearly...)
After some 4-5 months of use my battery wear is at 14% but I really don't care. When the time comes that it starts bothering me, I'll just buy a new battery (which by then shouldn't be costing more than 40-50 bucks on ebay).

 

I have an E7440 and have never noticed this before. I know there are BIOS settings that allow you to customize when the charging starts and stops, but I didn't set anything, so it charges up to 100% every time I plug it in. Are you referring to plugging it in when > 90% and not charging? Or seeing that charging does not begin until it slowly discharges < 90% while having the system plugged in the entire time? If the latter, I think that would be by design, although I never leave it on AC that long for it to discharge up to 10%.

My battery came with about 3% wear, so I think what you saw is normal.

 

The custom charge settings in Power Manager / BIOS allow the user to set a charge range. However, what I'm seeing is that in order to charge the battery to 100% I have to first get the charge below 90%. I can understand having a threshold of a few percent below full before recharge restarts but 10% is roughly 10% of battery run time that I can't reliably access.

Both my batteries are in the 7 - 8% range shortfall in capacity as new so my 47Whr battery is only 44Whr. The Samsung notebooks I have bought in the past couple of years have arrived with batteries that have the Fully Charged capacity 2 or 3% above the design.

John