Latitude E7240 and E7440

Months go by, still no sign of a fix for the e7440 A16 \ A17 bios card reader defect.
Removes my confidence in Dell when evaluating new laptop.

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19664521

 

can some of you tell me how good, or not, the touchpad & its buttons perform on long-document typing frenzies?

 

I posted last month about getting the E7240. My first impressions were great.

But now my impressions are tainted by all these pretty big issues:
-I get extremely annoying coil whine. I thought one of the big advantages to having SSDs would be no noise unless the fan was on. That was the case in previous laptops of mine which were dead silent unless doing CPU intensive tasks. Well not this one. No matter what I do (plugged into AC or not), I get all these buzzing and crinkling noises coming from the computer, and it's extremely irritating. You can hear it easily without having to put your ear to the keyboard. Please let me know if you also have this issue.

-The fan profile is ridiculous. The fan will turn on for a couple seconds then turn back off. I never had this type of annoying behavior on any laptop before. Again, very loud, very annoying. I use openHW monitor to check for CPU temps, and the fan will turn on at around 70c. The fan will often be on at cpu loads of 15-20%, which is ridiculous! Fan is almost always on whenever I use the computer. So much for a low TDP.... My non-ULV sandy bridge laptops are all quieter.

-If I play a song or video, the audio will turn on, but only after an initial 2 second "lag" as if it the audio driver needed time to warm up (I know this is not the case, this seems to be a bug). This means the first 2 seconds of any youtube video you play will be inaudible unless you manually go back to listen after the audio has "waken up".

-speaker seems distorted, maybe broken. The speaker vibrates like crazy and certain frequencies will make your ears bleed. Take for example the windows 10 error sound. This sound will drive the speakers absolutely nuts and give a horrid rattle to the whole computer.

If anybody has these issues let me know. For the coil whine I've tried everything. Unplugging the AC adapter to see if electrical noise was causing it, disabling all bluetooth drivers etc...

I really want to like this laptop because of the weight and upgradeability, but with these issues it has been more frustrating than anything. I would greatly appreciate any help.

Edit: Also an issue where sometimes for a few seconds the entire screen's colors will be oversaturated with the highlights clipped like crazy (white backgrounds will hurt your eyes, colors are over-blown etc...) . To understand what I mean, this is a good representation of the issue I'm having:
http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/attachm...160757-abrupt-highlights-clipping-image36.jpg

It will then revert back to normal.

 

While some of these are reasonable gripes, but sing the word 'nightmare' to describe a product? You sound like the type of person who can find fault in anything.

Return it. Buy something else. I don't think there is anything anyone would be able to do for you that would make you satisfied.

 

@Sam808 I'm sure you have already tried troubleshooting it with different drivers and power management tweaks, and have installed various levels of BIOS releases to attempt to solve the issue. If true, it sounds like you got a lemon, and I'd definitely try to return it if at all possible.

 

Maybe me calling it a nightmare was a bit of an over-exaggeration, but this is a business laptop, and as such carriers a price premium. I thought the whole point in buying a business laptop over a consumer oriented one was the higher standards in QC. Most of the issues I listed have never occurred in even cheap $400 consumer laptops. To me it's unacceptable that a $1500 laptop would have such issues.

Are you so much of a dell fanboy to give them a pass on issues? Telling me to sod off and go buy something else doesn't solve anything, you could have saved yourself the trouble of writing a condescending and useless response.

Yes I've tried various drivers, and tried different BIOS versions to see if that was the problem.

The only real fix I've found is disabling C3 states in BIOS, which seems to significantly reduce the coil whine. It's already a big improvement in reducing the annoyance I get from this laptop.

I have heard disabling turbo boost also prevents the fan from ramping up suddenly even when your CPU load is relatively low. I haven't tried that one yet, because honestly it seems like a bit of a ridiculous "solution" to have to disable such a feature.

 

Have you raised your problems with Dell support? There are plenty of examples in these forums of users getting Dell to replace their mainboards because of coil while problems.

Fan noise needs further diagnosis. If a very short burst of CPU activity is sufficient to trigger the fan then I wonder whether the thermal paste was applied properly (perhaps too much of it) which results in the heat from the CPU not being efficiently transferred to the heat sink. You can ask Dell to send someone to investigate this although many users would do the repasting themselves.

However, once the fan is running then I expect it is one of the inherently noisy fans which Dell uses on many notebooks although many people don't notice the fan because of other background noise. I made some comments about this aspect in my E7450 review.

John

 

Hey, I've been having the same problem with speaker vibration. Did you just remove the fake smartcard? I would imagine that would create quite a bit of flex on the bottom left corner of the laptop.

 

Some of these issues did also resonate with me too. I found similar issues. But this was supposed to be normal for the product.

Look at HP Elitebook instead. Better quality through and through and there's none of these issues.

 

I just bought a new (Dell Outlet New, despite the model being a few years old) E7440 a few weeks ago. It replaces my Latitude 6430u (Dell's first business ultrabook), which I had for three years.

I debated between the E7440 and E7450, especially considering that the E7440 is technically two generations old with the E7470 now available. But I only paid about $570 delivered for it and it is a brand new unit. For that price, it included-

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (a great surprise since even the order confirmation shows Windows 8 Pro)!
Core i5-4310U
14.0" FHD (1920x1080) Anti-Glare (non-touch) LED Display
128GB SSD (augmented by a 2TB external drive, same as my previous system)
4GB DDR3L RAM (since upgraded to 16GB)
The rest is pretty much standard issue- Intel HD 4400 graphics, Webcam, Dual-pointing keyboard and (the best part) the 3-year On-site Next Day Repair Warranty.

There were a few minor disappointments.

The original listing on the Dell Outlet site indicated a backlit keyboard, which I've had on my previous two Latitudes, but it arrived with the standard keyboard. I fixed this issue for $18 via Ebay and a screwdriver.

My E7440 has the integrated fingerprint reader in the palmrest. Honestly, the last time I had this feature was back in 2007 and it wasn't that great, IMO. The technology has improved a lot since then, but the software required to utilize the fingerprint reader has far more drawbacks than benefits. Ultimately, I uninstalled the software and the fingerprint reader it useless. I hardly care.

Super Moderator Extraordinaire, John Ratsey, provided invaluable information and made me confident in my decision to buy the E7440. One of my primary requirements was the FHD (1920x1080) Non-Touch Display. He told me that there were two different suppliers for this display, AU Optronics (AUO) and LG. The LG display is the better of the two (no surprise, all of my flatscreen televisions are LG), but I ended up with the one from AUO. The display on my 6430u was also made by AUO and this one is equal or better in all areas, so I'm content. The resolution increase (from 1600x900 in my 6430u to 1920x1080) is definitely a big plus.

Overall, there isn't much of an improvement in performance compared to my 6430u. The Intel HD 4400 (compared to the HD 4000) provides a better multimedia experience, especially in terms of stability. The CPU was a modest upgrade from the i5-3427U to the i5-4310U processor. I wasn't expecting a substantial speed increase and my expectations were met. My old system delivered perfectly acceptable performance and the E7440 does the same. The user experience, especially the display, the integrated graphics improvement and the touchpad (sucked on the old one) is substantially improved.