New Dell Vostro V131

ok im starting to think that my battery is a defect.

it charges soooooo slowwwwww....after 3 hours of charging from a 90W brick. and its only at 75%. and im not even using the laptop while its charging.


does anyone noticing this?

 

I totally agree. The cooling is pretty effective, but I do find that the name is a bit flashy for what it really means high (hyper) pressure (baric), referring to the fans blowing out a lot of air. The only thing I really hate about the fan is the whine.

 

Your charging speed will not increase with a larger 90W brick.. Mine also came with a 90W brick and I called to complain and they mailed me a 65W one. 90W bricks are normally used on larger laptops with discrete graphics card.

The battery capacity is 65,500 mWH and my batterybar (batterybar.com) history shows that at 20% capacity it takes approx 3 hours to charge. That means the charging rate is 17,466 mW per hour. This is quite normal. Not to mention, the dell charger is designed to lower its charging rate as it comes to a completion. This will prolong the life of the battery.

 

I am sick of the crappy centurion 1030 WIFI BT module. Wifi performance sucks. When I talked to Dell previously they said they could replace the module with another of the same, but that won't really help. Has anyone upgraded their mini pice wifi card? Is the a model that I can choose and keep BT and the wireless display features? That would be ideal but the priority is stable high performance wifi.

 

Do you have to install any software/drivers for this tapered charging features? I did a fresh windows install and have never noticed this feature.

 

I don't see that issue, it was mentioned that it is related to the advance power management feature some routers that are badly implemented. I have 2 v131, one with dell 1702, another with 1030 and i would love to have the 1702 changed any day(as the 1030 has WIDI).

Beside, the 1702 seems to be slower as well.

you can buy your module and replace them yourself following the user manual(needs to remove the keyboard and the cover).

 

Have you succeeded to create the recovery disk with "Dell backup and recovery management". It seems I cannot create an image (to later transfer to a pc with an optical drive) but just use directly an optical drive that I haven't.

 

I have adapted an AutoHotKey script in order to have F1 to F7 working as Fn keys (so you can refresh with F5 and edit with F2 for example) and the multimedia key after F7 working as multimedia keys instead (increase/decrease/mute volume, skip/pause songs).

- Run Windows Mobility center and set Function Key Row as "Function key"
- Extract the attached archive and run FnRemapper
- Select the Fn Key ReMapper try icon, right click, startup with windows

In the zip attached I have also included the source script if anybody has any improvement to suggest.

 

Ops, forgot the icon, this should work

 

Improved version attached (volume now works properly)