Latitude E7240 and E7440

Hello John Ratsey and others, I just read through all 83 pages of this section. Thanks very much for a wealth of interesting and helpful information.

I just picked up a e7240 touch screen that has 2 years warranty remaining. this will serve as a nice travel or back-up laptop incase my primary laptop has some issues.

 

I've tried poking around on various windows forums but haven't had any luck, so figure I'd ask here...

Is anyone having trouble with their webcam after upgrading to Windows 10? I can get it to work on various windows apps (Skype, Edge browser), but I can't seem to get it to work in chrome, firefox, or IE 11. My family uses google hangouts for video chats pretty frequently and I haven't been able to get it to work since upgrading to Windows 10. Anybody seeing similar issues? My hunch is that it's a windows setting allowing the new windows apps to access the camera but not allowing traditional desktop programs to access it. I'd appreciate any feedback.

 

Could someone please mention whether I can upgrade the 1366x768 display to 1080p. If so, can I use the same 1080 panels used by the the E7450?

Thank you!

 

Lately it just seems when I turn on my E7440, the fan comes on right away, then runs for about five minutes at medium speed and then shuts off for a while, then comes back on for five minutes, repeat. It didn't do this before. Before I clean it out, I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this? Is there a program like ThinkPadFanControl for Dells?

 

Sorry I didn't catch this earlier. If you haven't found a solution in the 3-4 weeks since you posted, I have some suggestions.

1- I have the 'Dell Command - Power Manager' utility on my E7440. You should be able to download it from the support site if you don't have it. Once you open the Power Manager, it gives you options for Battery Info and Charging preferences and several other things, but Thermal Management is the one you'd need. It has four settings- Optimized, Cool, Quiet and Ultra Performance. Quiet would be the one to minimize fan activity, but that could also limit performance. But sometimes it's worth giving up some speed for quiet!

2- My system also includes several profiles in Control Panel -> Power Options. I know that Balanced, Power Saver and 'Dell' are included on all, but I also have Quiet and High Performance profiles. Inside the profiles for each, you can choose Change Plan Settings and scroll down to Processor power management. Under System cooling policy, the choices are Active (more fan activity) or Passive (for less fan noise).

3- The other suggestion (and it's something I do every 3-4 months) is to remove the bottom cover and use compressed air to blow any dust out of the vents and the fan.

Hope this helps!

 

old post regarding powershare .. I experience the exact same thing (E7440) and I am strongly on the opinion that its a BIOS bug. It even says in the feature description in the BIOS that you should be able to set a certain percentage of the battery above which it will provide power via USB (even when turned completely off) - on battery obviously, other than that the description would not make any sense.
But then there is no option to set any percentage just enabled / disabled. And it does not work with the computer turned off and on battery.

Anyone found any solution?

 

I recently picked up a E7440 as another travelling machine. eBay listing, low price, no photos and the seller was very reserved with giving out details. Actually, it turned out to be a good machine. Full HD screen, 8GB of RAM, 4310U i5 and in generally good cosmetic condition.

A few notes, since I read the whole thread and some of the info seems a bit outdated:

1. This most recent trackpad update fixes a lot of annoyances (Dell Touchpad driver by Alps Version: 10.2207.101.118) and while it's never going to be as good as a Macbook, it works well enough. I was expecting an abomination based upon the comments I read but the two-finger scroll works fine.

2. The keyboard does have flex but I really don't find it to be a huge issue. I finished typing a 20,000-word write-up yesterday and while I will concede that it's not as good as the keyboards found on the Latitude E6410 and the like, it's certainly nice to type on. I mostly wish that the keys had the same shape as the E6410 but it's not a major issue.

3. I tried undervolting with Throttlestop and managed a stable -50mv limit. With this said, it only leads to a small reduction in temperature - 2c at most. I suppose with a low voltage CPU, there is less to gain here.

4. Repasted with Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut liquid metal and saw a big reduction in temperature. 54c at idle before, down to 43c afterwards. Stressed with Prime95: 83c before and 73c after. This may not seem much of a reduction but the fan was running at max before but at a lower speed after. Sadly, the TDP limit kicks in after a while but the temps seemed pretty consistent before this happened. This big drop can at least partly be attributed to the dried-out condition of the paste that was applied before.

5. When stressed with Prime95, the CPU is TDP eventually throttled down to ~2.2GHz, where it stays.

6. Installing a fresh version of Windows 7 and 8.1 and then manually installing only the required drivers is highly recommended. These manual updates were the touchpad, Intel graphics, chipset drivers and Ethernet drivers.

7. SSD is a worthwhile upgrade - although this applies to most systems. Installed a 2.5" SATA SSD as I didn't have an MSATA drive spare.

8. The biggest reservation I had about the E7440 was in regards to fan noise. I haven't really noticed an issue in this regard, since I repasted with Conductonaut. It's mostly silent when doing internet and office tasks, which makes for a relaxed and silent environment to type in. While I type this post and with a few other tasks running, the CPU is sitting at 44c without the fan running and has been for the past 30 minutes. When the system is stressed it does become audible but it's not horrific.

9. Coil whine/capacitor noise. I get a bit of this noise but it's very faint and only noticeable in a silent room. Disabling the C1E state with Throttlestop seems to help.

10. The coating on the chassis is very easy to scratch. Plugging in/removing USB and HDMI cables has to be done with a degree of care and previous latitudes seemed more forgiving of this.

11. I picked up a system with the 4310U i5 CPU as it was significantly cheaper than the i7 models on eBay. The i5 has a 200MHz lower turbo rate (3GHz vs 3.2GHz of the i7 4600U) and a slightly smaller cache but I haven’t been given cause to complain. The i5 runs multiple programs while also running a virtual machine, so it’s good enough.

Overall, I’m very happy and although it has an evil BGA, low-voltage CPU, it serves well as a quiet travelling machine to type on. The full HD screen was one of the biggest selling points. Repasting with Conductonaut was very worthwhile. To be honest, I am considering an upgrade of the current 8GB of RAM – probably to 16GB, as I’m often nudging 95% of RAM usage. I attached some screenshots of before and after the CPU repasting.

Idle Before repasting (The screenshots were taken just as the TDP limit kicked in, hence the low multiplier):



Idle After:



Stressed Before:



Stressed After:



These are appearing on eBay at an attractive price at the moment, so I thought I'd add some observations for anybody considering a purchase. Feel free to ask any questions.

 

^^^^ ref http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/latitude-e7240-and-e7440.718952/page-84#post-10627237

Agree. it's a good machine, been using mine extensively for 3 years. Bought 2nd hand at a good price. (i7, 8gb, excellent LG full hd matte, w8.1 with all metro apps & unused Dell stuff etc deleted. Classic Shell). Replaced wwan card with msata (os \ programs), hd for files.

Touchpad & keyboard fine (touchpad goes momentarily crazy when laptop used in hot summer sun :O) No sign of coil whine. Audio jack sometimes having problems recognizing anything plugged in, cure was using stock ms audio drivers. Battery time could have been better, but ok for my use. Repasted and gained a few degrees. Silent for all normal use, fan spins up for video work etc, that's normal and no annoyance, & will work a long time before throttling down.

Very happy with it, was evaluating getting a 2nd 7440, as suggested in post above.

 

So, there was no actual need but 16GB of RAM (2x8GB) popped up for cheap, so I bought the two sticks and installed them. If anyone else is considering a RAM upgrade, it's necessary to buy DDR3L memory - the 'L' apparently means low voltage. 16GB is the max, so far as I've been able to find out.

It's confusing because sometimes RAM is explicitly marked as being DDR3L and sometimes it isn't. The RAM that I bought wasn't marked as DDR3L but when I looked up the product code, some stores such as Newegg stated it was DDR3L, while others stated it was DDR3. It turns out that it is DDR3L - even if it doesn't say it on the RAM sticker. Interestingly, my Windows Experience index for desktop graphics increased from 5.6 to 5.7 and RAM score increased from 7.5 to 7.6 - I'd guess the RAM speed for the new memory is faster than the sticks that were already installed.

The general RAM specs for the E7440 are: DDR3-1600Mhz, PC3-12800 , 1.35V. The model number I bought was CT102464BF160B.

Also, the temperatures have been consistent, which suggests that the heatsink works well with liquid metal - I'm going to wait another few weeks and then take a look at whether or not it has moved. I've had the system in my bag every day while riding a motorcycle, running, cycling and it has been thrown around a fair bit. Short of intentionally throwing the system on the floor, I doubt I could do anything further that might make the liquid metal move.

I swapped the keyboard over as the old one had labels over some of the keys and the backlight wasn't very visible (First world problems)- it's really not too difficult. I used double-sided tape to stick it down. Has helped with flex - although I wasn't overly bothered by it before.

I also ordered a used, 128Gb Samsung MSATA drive, which I'll install once it arrives. I already have a 2.5" SSD in the SATA bay, so this will be replacing the WWAN card. I'm curious about MSATA temps on the system and will post them up once I've tested it.

 

The mSATA drive arrived and it works well enough. It's quite an old, used drive, so it's slower than the 2.5 Sandisk SSD that runs the OS but it's fine for storing virtual machine images and other bulk data. Samsung gave it a sleek and sophisticated name: The 'MZMPA128HMFU-000H1'. Benchmarked it thoroughly with Crystaldiskmark and temps hit a max of 43C, which isn't too bad. I was mostly curious about the temps and whether there would be any throttling - no sign of it but it's hardly the fastest disk in the world.

I'm not particularly impressed with the WiFi card. IMO, the range and stability could be better. Only had the chance to connect by 802.11 N so far to a few routers (Old tech, so no AC) and had various WiFi cut-outs. Might consider swapping it out but I'm mostly using cable connection, so it'll do for now.

Temps for the CPU are still good - I'll open the system up next week and see how the Conductonaut is looking.

One last thing: installing the Realtek audio driver (6.0.1.6122) from the Dell driver page seems to have got rid of the 'popping' noise that occasionally happened when playing audio.