New Dell Vostro V131

Tried that. Tried it with 2 different chargers too.

Also tried removing the battery, holding power button for 10 secs, then plugging it in w/o the battery and only the ac adapter attached.... nope... Basically ran through everything with the tech...

I am really thinking it overheated which is sad considering that I wasn't really running it hard at all.

 

Unless something was off with your particular system overheating seems unlikely. I've got an refurb i5 and have stressed it with prime95+furmark, and also encoded movies. The CPU temps rarely exceed 80C and the CPU doesn't throttle. Notebookcheck's review finds similar temp numbers during their benchmarks.

That being said, sorry about your trouble. I highly recommend an online backup service that continuously monitors your files. Many services provide 2GB of space for free, and that's usually more than enough for all the documents created during grad school.

Personally, I use SpiderOak because everything is encrypted locally and they cannot read my files. You can also access your files from their website - this has saved me in the past.

 

i would like to ask some questions about the V131
1) is there a way to turn off bluetooth?
2) is there a way to turn off webcam?
3) i notice there is a recovery partition... how do i use recovery partition? i have been trying to find how to activate recovery but... i just couldnt find it
thank you

 

Do you have a USB hard drive lying around? If so, take the hard drive out of the laptop.

Then take the USB hard drive casing apart. Pull out the hard drive from the casing and put your laptop hard drive into in it's place. Plug it in another computer and it'll read it as a storage drive.. grab your file, then put everything back.

Have you called Dell? They can overnight parts to a local authorized technician and they will come to your home the following day to swap the defective part out.

Don't lose confidence on this laptop, the exact same thing happened to me on my Acer Travelmate 11.6" laptop while riding the trolley home from work. I was doing a live collaborative with 20 users on a google document and I guess it worked my cpu and I heard the fan kick in for 10 seconds at it's highest, and the laptop just turned off.

It's a good thing your laptop crapped out on you sooner than later. Your warranty will get you a completely new motherboard and whatever else that burned out. Which is no different than getting a new laptop, it still has to be put together by someone.

Oh by the way, for anyone reading this, make sure you Disable the Allow USB Wake feature in your bios. If you have a USB cordless mouse where you leave the dongle in the USB slot, once in sleep mode, the laptop will turn on! This has happened to me once and the laptop overheated because it woke up while in my backpack and the vent was obstructed.

 

Very good point on the cloud storage.

I personally use Google Cloud Connect which is a plugin for your Office 2003, 2007, or 2010 to allow you to sync your Word Doc, Excel Doc to google's site.

Google Cloud Connect Overview

It is very easy to use!

 

1) Bluetooth is integrated with the Wifi, so turning it off won't change the power consumption, but you can disable bluetooth broadcasting, etc.
2) Doesn't look like you can disconnect the webcam through a hotkey. There is a bright white light that tells you when your webcam is on
3) The recovery partition can be accessed right after the bios screen disappears, but right before window starts to boot up. Hit F8 repeatedly to bring up the menu, then your first option is to do Windows Recovery.. Once it loads up the recovery, there is an option to restore to Dell Factory.

 

I usually use dropbox to save my files across my platforms but for some reason, I only save files to it weekly. I keep them on my desktop, then move them on the weekend when I review them... Lesson learned.

As far as using a USB hard drive enclosure, that was my plan to get the files back from the get-go.

 

**edit** on 2/3/2012

After making the post below I continued to test to determine why the Core i5 V131 was throttling on the 65W adapter when tested with Furmark+Prime95 (2 threads). The culprit turned out to be the portable USB 3.0 drive. The USB 3.0 drive adds ~2-3 Watts to the laptop power draw, and I think the V131 throttled back to not hit the 65W limit. I'm not sure why it did this as the V131 never drew 65W, even on the 90W adapter. Maybe it spikes beyond ~65W and my power meter was not fast enough to detect this.

Also note that when there is only a full CPU load (no GPU load) the system does not throttle, even if the USB 3.0 drive is attached.

With the USB 3.0 drive unplugged there is no throttling. I tested this in a range of situations, including Prime 95 plus the Cinebench 11 OpenGL benchmark. Some gamers might see some benefit to the 90W adapter but that is just conjecture on my part.

** end edit **

I've been testing the 65W and 90W power adapters with the core i5-2430M V131. I'm stumbled across a throttling issue that seems to be a software (BIOS?) issue. Keep in mind this throttling occurs only during a full GPU load. With just a full CPU load there is NO throttling. Even with full GPU+50% CPU I see this throttling.

First, my test setup. I'm not doing anything extensive -basically just prime95 (4 threads)+furmark (default 800x600 test). I then used a Kill-A-Watt to look at power consumption and HWiNFO64 to look at sensors. The system was set to High Performance, screen was at full brightness, and the backlit keyboard was on. Battery was at to 60%.

Maximum power consumption under stress testing initially went to 63W (for a few seconds) then dropped to ~60W and stayed there. This is consistent across adapters. Current consumption for 90W settles to just about .5A and the 65W settled at .9A and .5A during two separate (identical) tests. The 90W seems to consistently draw ~50% less current as compared to the 65W - I really don't know what's going on with that.

In theory, the 65W (rated at a max of 1.6A AC draw) should have no issues whatsoever.

However, the laptop is throttling when powered by the 65W adapter. With the 90W, or only on the battery (brick unplugged), the CPU stays at 2.4Ghz and the GPU at 750-800Mhz. With the 65W adapter the CPU constantly throttles to 700Mhz and the GPU constantly drops to 650Mhz.

In all cases CPU temps hit a max of 80C, which is well under the temps typically seen for throttling. Even more strange is that with the 65W test the temps drop under 70C due to the throttling and the fans even slow down because of the reduced temperature.

Since this throttling does not occur when on battery I have a hard time believing the 65W adapter is insufficient. Something else must be occurring

 

Im really sorry to hear

I use dropbox also but the google plugin has saved me many times since it auto syncs. When you do your initial save to your HD or Dropbox and give it a filename, google automatically syncs it, and the nice thing is, each time you do a Save, it uploads it as a new revision in case you need to go back. I've found that to be a very valuable feature.

What's the latest scoop on your situation?

 

I have yet to pull the HDD but they gave me a full refund and sent me a link for a shipping label to return the system. I was kinda hoping they would also give me a custom coupon code to keep my business...