Latitude E7240 and E7440

The three buttons are attached to the palmrest, so you wouldn't get that.

 

Dell has released a new version of the BIOS for the second time (ver. A16) and after update my card reader doesn't work. I had to downgrade to a previous version of bios and now with ver. A15 everything works fine.

Someone else card reader doesn't work with the latest version BIOS (my OS: Windows 10 Pro)?​

 

This is why I never update the BIOS unless there's a need.

 

Ditto.

 

Did the bigger battery work on the e7240?

 

I got exactly the same result with the A16 bios. Updated, card reader stopped working (W8.1), tried various O2Micro drivers but it wouldn't get back up. Downgraded to A15. Card reader is working fine, but when computer wakes up from sleep it is slow as hell. Only if you restart it the processor works again full speed (i7 4600u). Note that with the A16 bios, this problem went away.

This is not a cheap laptop, i would expect much more from Dell. Next one will be something else.

 

That seems a bit shortsighted. The Latitudes from the Outlet are just about the best value notebooks one can buy these days. I would also mention it's an imperfect world and I presume your machine is still under warranty, so the harm should be relatively minor.

 

Agreed. Looking at the big picture, this was a fairly minor BIOS bug that is reversible. If you open a warranty ticket with them, that'll let them know about the issue and help get a fix out.

Also, there's no guarantee that other manufacturers will be any better. Lenovo and HP have their share of issues, and in my experience, Dell has been much better (especially warranty support).

 

Thing is that i'm not from the US, and we don't have a Dell Outlet or similar options around. I paid something like EUR 1300 for this, and i was really confident about my purchase considering that a couple Latitudes i owned before worked flawlessly.

The A15 bios has this issue that i'm also facing: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19656464
The A16 bios kills the card reader. I mean, is this so difficult to fix? I could understand a hardware failure on my specific laptop, but those issues affect the whole e7440/i7 line.

Anyway, i will contact Dell Support and let's see if they come up with a fix.

 

I also believe the outlet latitudes are the best deal out there. You get 2 ram slots, 2 msata slots, removable battery, docking capability. I prefer the e7240 keyboard over the 50. You won't even find that in a thinkpad which I've almost exclusively used.

I have not experienced what you have but I never update the bios unless it solves a glaring problem. So much risk, so little reward usually. I use throttlestop and I disable turbo as that's super gimicky. I never use the card reader but I have a usb card reader that accepts sd, mirco sd, memory stick. I like that laptop but I'd never pay 1300 eur for it. At the price I bought it for, I'm very happy with it as the best ultrabook I've used.

You're going to pull your hair out waiting for dell to fix this, it could be next week or year. So you can use throttlestop, it's life you can't expect everything to line up perfectly.

Also all the other ultrabooks suck and I need at 16gb or 32gb to run a few vms so if you need more than 8gb ram, docking, easy user upgrades your choice is limited to this line.