Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

Using the system for a couple of days, I have some additional observations to post.

First, regarding the fan behavior. The fans are quiet but they are not silent, I haven't had the system spin them down to the point of not being able to hear them. However, I wouldn't call them distractingly loud by any means. Naturally, they do spin up when the system is under load. I was surprised at how quickly they spin back down when the load goes away, in just a few seconds. My M6700 and 7510 seem to keep the fan running at a high speed for several minutes after the load goes away. So, overall, I am satisfied with the fan behavior.

Second, regarding the TB18DC dock. I've been experiencing USB "hiccups" with devices attached to the dock. This includes the keyboard and mouse. I will notice keys getting "stuck" or the system not responding to keys for about a second, from time to time, and also periodic mouse stutters, where the mouse cursor doesn't move while I am moving it and then "catches up" with itself after a second. These issues are infrequent but occurring often enough to be distracting (especially the keyboard issue). The issues seem to line up exactly with what users describe with the TB16 dock in this thread, and it seemed to be introduced with a firmware update in prior systems and could be fixed by rolling back the firmware. Rolling back the firmware isn't an option with this system. Hopefully this gets fixed, but in the meantime, I will be connecting a USB cable to the system in addition to the dock cable…

(I tried using the Microsoft USB 3.0 drivers for the USB controller in the dock, instead of the ASMedia ones provided by Dell, to see if that made any difference... But they totally didn’t work. The USB turned on and off several times before settling on "off" and an error showed in Device Manager, stating that the device had been shut down because of repeated problems.)

 

Another thing, relating to the touchpad this time. On prior systems, I would always select the option in the ALPS touchpad control panel to disable the touchpad when a separate mouse was connected. This worked fine.

On this system, the touchpad is a Windows Precision touchpad and the ALPS control panel is gone. However, in the Windows Settings touchpad section, there is a similar option to disable the touchpad when another mouse is connected. Awesome, I turned it on.

Pick up my laptop and take it to a meeting, and the touchpad does not work. I figure that it is because the system "thinks" that there is another mouse plugged in. Dig in and find out that the little nub tracker thing on the keyboard is actually a separate mouse device now (previous systems had this and the touchpad combined as one "logical" mouse), and apparently Windows counts it as a separate mouse when deciding whether the touchpad should be on or not. So, the "disable the touchpad when another mouse is connected" option is now useless as the nub tracker mouse is always there.

 

Haha thanks for such detailed information. Btw how is the battery life in your daily usage . Thanks

 

I took it to a meeting and noticed that it said that I had 3.5 hours of battery life remaining. This was with graphics switching off, the screen at max brightness, and no effort to close background applications. I didn't run it on battery for more than an hour and I didn't pay attention to what the battery level was when I plugged it back in. I'm typically not a battery-heavy user, it's docked most of the time, but I'll try to get some more information next time I take it off of my desk.

 

The i9 on the 7730 I looked at was completely unlocked. 5.0Ghz was an easy overclock with Intel XTU.

 

Has anyone else done a fresh Windows install and had problems with the touchpad? I was setting up our other two units today and neither of them see the touchpad after a fresh Windows install. If I try to run the driver installer, it says that the touchpad is not supported. Device Manager does not show any missing devices (and the touchpad is nowhere to be seen). I know it works though because I can use it in the BIOS setup.

My unit had this issue but it disappeared after a couple of reboots while I was installing drivers and such, not sure what I did to make it show up.

 

The guy on Reddit Dell subreddit having same issue after installing their company image. I assume this Dell hasn't put a proper driver there for the touchpad since the computer is so new. Maybe tell then at Dell support forum ?

 

I will be calling them on Monday.

 

You need to install the Serial IO driver from the Dell site.

 

Thanks, I will give that a try.