Precision 3510 Lounge

I've posted a few things on the Dell community forums but they don't seem that active so I want to see if anyone here can chat an help with issues.

So to begin with, here is my review of the laptop...

"Have to say this workstation is giving me some problems so far that are fundamentally slowing down my work process.

Disk Access at 100% - I realize this has a lot to do with Windows 10 and my slower drive but it gets bogged down so that the mouse stutters in movement and things almost stop. Had to search high and low across the internet for strange little tweaks and things to turn off to get it not do it as much. Everything from turning off notifications to manually setting the page file size.

Intel HD Graphics - Crashes all the time freezing the screen. This is with the latest BIOS and driver updates (on beta 4444 just to see if it helped). Black squares appear in browser windows and in my VMware virtual machines. Since I am back and forth between browsers and VMs and email, I get this crash a lot. Which I could just switch to using the AMD graphics card that could handle everything without issue but it seems this may be architecturally impossible which seems to be a bad choice for a system that is supposed to be this powerful and forward thinking."

The graphics issue is driving me batty to be honest. Switchable Graphics without the option to disable and all these freezes is seriously bad engineering and testing. How could this laptop go out into the market with such an easily producible flaw?

I had to disable hardware acceleration in Chrome just to get it to stop putting random black squares on the screen all the time. Still does it occasionally.

Does anyone else have this issue? I've updated to the latest drivers and bios even installing a beta Intel HD driver recommended to fix this issue.

 

Are you running the Dell Windows image, or did you reinstall/reset?

You might also ask in the E5570 thread; the hardware is very closely related.

 

It's a stock Dell Windows Image with my tinkering with the versions of drivers.

I can't do a total reinstall as it's my work system so while I have broad admin powers, I have to defer to my IT guy in matters where I wipe everything.

It's just odd how graphics switching could cause all this. Reading the BIOS updates, they supposedly fixed the graphics issues but I get the feeling that this system might have reintroduced them.

 

Are there any more owners of this machine that have any inputs?

 

I'm in a rather unique position. I have a Dell 3510 on my desk right now for the next couple of days. What do you guys wanna know?

Initial impressions:
- Build quality is very good. Keyboard area is really stiff. It looks exactly like the E5570 that I have on my bench as well but I think they used a different material on the case, the 3510 is really stiffer. Screen is stiff too, I would be comfortable in putting this laptop inside my regular backpack with just a neoprene sleeve and a few notebooks or books.
- Surface finish looks nice, does not show fingerprints but oily hands are going to leave a mark.
- Keyboard feels nice. I am not the fastest typist, I average at around 60 WPM on a good day but typing is easy for me.
- Track pad is "meh" not as good as the ones on the XPS13 or XPS15 but good enough.
- Its has the FHD IPS (1920x1080) anti-lgare LED0backlit (72% color gamut) screen. Viewing angles are not that wide I think, I notice brightness shifts when I view the screen at an angle but texts are still readable. Screen does look good and has very slight backlight bleed at the bottom but I only noticed it when I turned the background completely black.

 

If you open google.com (or a white background) and set the screen to the lowest brightness setting, then point a cell phone camera at the screen, do you see scrolling bars on the mobile phone screen?

Thank you.

 

I used a Sony Z3 Compact and opened google.com with Microsoft Edge. Set the screen to darkest setting. Entered a test search so that I have enough items on the screen to have a scroll bar. I can still see both the light and the dark portions of the scroll bar at the right of the screen.

If I can ask, what are you testing for here?

Here is a picture if you need it.

 

Sorry, it's an unscientific test for PWM flicker.

Something like this:

 

Watched the screen through my cellphone while adjusting the brightness, from max to minimum and then back again. I am seeing no flicker like in the video.

 

As I mentioned, the test is unscientific and doesn't prove anything one way or another, but I have a feeling the 3510 is pwm flicker free (sic).

Thank you for taking the time to verify that.

These seem to be good machines, but seem to have some issues according to reports here. Lack of reviews isn't doing any good!