Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

To give my experience... I have 225% scaling on my Dell 7530 4K and 150% scaling on my 4K external monitor. I've had this same setup with multiple laptops and have had virtually no problems. The only thing that I've found is that if you have many things on the desktop could get moved on the smaller display if they are beyond the borders of where that high scaled display would be on the larger monitor (from top left corner).

Specifically with the Dell 7530 and my monitor things work like a charm.

 

Hi guys, I've skimmed through this thread and didn't see my issue. Forgive me if this has been covered already.

I just got the 7530 and love it so far. I got it with Ubuntu preinstalled, since I already have a Windows 10 for Education ISO and product key, and I was planning to use Debian as my main OS anyway (It's what I'm used to). However, Debian had trouble detecting the Ethernet or wlan interface during installation (even after giving it the iwlwifi and e1000e drivers), and once installed using the full DVD iso, it still couldn't find the interfaces with the modules loaded. The touchpad also did not work in Debian.

I moved on to trying to install Windows 10. It also could not detect the touchpad, and I had to use an external mouse. It complained of needing a "media driver" and would not proceed with installation.

Has anyone successfully installed Windows 10 or Debian with the correct drivers? I've tried using both the included NVMe SSD, and the additional one I purchased (Samsung PM961, basically an OEM Samsung Evo 960).

Thanks!
Kevin

 

Update of the situation.

After a couple of days, I finally noticed that Microsoft drivers produce some latencies and very little pops just before and just after each sound. I decided to give Realtek drivers a try.

No pops with Realtek drivers, but they really have an issue in handling mono sounds, especially when they are played by Microsoft Edge --sound is like it is not properly decoded (very difficult to explain). When this occur, mono sounds are rendered exactly the same way in Microsoft Groove Music or Windows Media Player applications. The sound is perfectly played as soon as Edge is closed.

In brief: Realtek drivers cannot play mono sound under certain circumstance and have high latency, and Microsoft drivers produce pops and have less latency.

 

On the Windows side, you must install the Intel Serial I/O driver before the touchpad will work (I noted this in the very first post in this thread). The media driver thing is coming up because you have the disk mode set to RAID in the BIOS. Either load the Intel Rapid Storage "F6" driver, or switch it to AHCI mode.

 

Thanks for the touchpad info. I just rechecked and it is definitely set to AHCI, not RAID, so I'll try to find the F6 driver and give that a shot.

 

The Intel Rapid Storage driver will only help if RAID mode is turned on. I can't say why it would be complaining if you have the system set to AHCI. I've done Windows installs on three systems to M.2/NVMe drives and aside from the touchpad issue, there wasn't really anything notable about them.

 

Yeah, I'm really not sure what's going on.... The Win10 installer didn't recognize the .exe from Dell, so I extracted it with 7z and it also didn't see the real driver files inside, so a bit lost. I'll try running it in RAID mode and see if that breaks anything. Maybe it's something odd with my Win10 for Education ISO -- I was told it is like Win10 Enterprise but with different licensing, maybe my school did something odd to it.

 

Win10 Enterprise and Education are basically identical except for where you get them from.

To load drivers, the Windows 10 installer will want extracted files, a folder full of stuff including an .inf file. The Intel Rapid Storage "F6" driver should extract to just this. Here's a link to the actual Intel version.

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/do...l-RST-User-Interface-and-Driver?product=55005
Get f6flpy-x64.zip, extract it to a flash drive or something, and point the Windows 10 installer there.

It is fine to run the system with RAID mode turned on even if you do not create any arrays (I think this is the factory configuration).

 

Regarding Debian Stretch on the 7530, I have it working mostly. The only thing not working yet is WiFi, I'm expecting to fix this soon, and will update when I figure it out.

Here is how I installed Debian on my Dell Precision 7530:

1. Put the Debian DVD #1 iso onto a flash drive. Find it here: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/
2. Install Debian as normal, ignore issues with not being able to fetch network resources. Use additional DVD ISOs if necessary to get packages.
3. Debian Stretch comes with Linux 4.9.0.7 at the time of writing. This is too old. Using another computer, grab 4.17 from Stretch Backports (here: https://packages.debian.org/stretch-backports/linux-image-4.17.0-0.bpo.3-amd64)
4. With the system booted, install the newer kernel with "sudo dpkg -i <filename.deb>".
5. Reboot. Make sure you boot into the 4.17 kernel with Grub.
6. Touchpad and Ethernet work at this point. Plug your laptop into Ethernet to continue.
7. Add the stretch-backports repo to your sources.list. Instructions here: https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/. Also, since you used DVD only during the install, sources.list has stretch-updates commented out. Uncomment those lines so you can get updates in the future.
8. Update the kernel to the latest using apt. For me, that was "apt-get install linux-image-4.18.0-0.bpo.1-amd64"
9. Reboot. Make sure you boot into 4.18 with Grub.
10. Remove 4.17 -- 'apt-get remove linux-image-4.17.0-0.bpo.3-amd64'
11. 
    
12. Done!

I'll update the thread once I get WiFi working. Right now, I'm getting errors in dmesg about minimum/maximum versions, so I think I'll need to download the latest iwlwifi from git and compile it locally. Will test that soon...

 

This did not work for me unfortunately. It offered to install the "Intel(R) 300 Series Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller (D:\iaAHCIC.inf)", and after hitting Next, it said "No new device drivers were found. Make sure the installation media contains the correct drivers, and then click OK.".
Hmm...

Edit: I switched to RAID mode in the BIOS, and had the same error (different driver names though). Perhaps I should call or email Dell and ask what drivers are necessary, or if they could send me the recovery image for Win10.