Precision 7560 & 7760 Owners' Thread

Just to give the post a bump, also note this post from @Dell-Mano_G asking people with this symptom to get in touch for further investigation
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...60-owners-thread.836381/page-73#post-11113788

 

Hey Guys,

Like some of you, I too experienced high battery drain, 40-50W on hybrid mode and 30+W with hybrid mode off, battery life of 1.5 to 2 hours.

I was doing some troubleshooting and found the dGPU to be wake up intermittently as reported by both hwinfo and Optimus Tester.

I contacted Dell support and after a few email exchange, 1 or 2 solutions worked for me.

I installed Dell optimiser and used the power manager to get the profile to "Optimised".

At that mode, I was able to get battery drain down to 12W (some instance it got to 10W) and got about 5.5 hours of work done on a single charge (not fantastic, but acceptable, I got 8 hours out of my gaming laptop).

I hope this can fix the battery drain issue for some of you.

My further exchange with Dell support is becoming laughable right now.

 

Are you using the standard plastic cage to hold the drive in the Gen4 slot? I noticed that without it the pogo pin that cuts power to the slot for the quick swap feature does not get properly pressed. So with an after market M.2 heatsink you would need to tape that pin down in order for the installed drive to actually power on. Even if the bottom cover does not have a quick swap door that pogo pin is still present on the motherboard.

 

I'm using the plastic enclosure thing that came with the system. I've tried to pay careful attention to it when doing the install but it's possible that I have somehow messed it up (repeatedly). I haven't located the "pogo pin" but I will look for this next time I open up the system.

The strange thing is though, I did a lot of swapping drives around when I first got the system, and consistently, I only had this issue with a PCIe4 drive installed in that slot. I've never had the problem with a PCIe3 drive installed (which is the case right now).

 

This all sounds pretty interesting. I have never used Clonezilla but would like to clone the Windows image on my 256 GB drive that came with the system to one of my 2 TB PCIE3 drives and then use the 2 TB drive for my Windows drive. Then, I would install Fedora 34 on my 2 TB PCIE4 drive and use the other 2 TB PCIE3 drive and the 256 GB PCIE3 drive for Linux data drives. I'm assuming that if I cloned the 256 GB Windows drive with Clonezilla to the 2 TB PCIE3 drive that all of the 2 TB would be available for Windows. Is that correct?

 

Yes, the entire 2TB becomes available to Windows.
Clonezilla will read & write at the block level, and the restored drive partitions will look identical to the original. After cloning you would use Windows Management's Disk Management tool to adjust the partition sizes to your liking and/or to create additional partitions. On my new 2TB SSD I left the C: drive size as is and created a large D: drive that I formatted as NTFS, leaving room for Ubuntu. Under Ubuntu I normally don't mount the C: drive at all, and that large D: partition mounts during startup as /data. The Ubuntu install created the root drive out of the remaining space. My partition table looks like this:

• EFI system partition 70MB used out of 100MB
• Microsoft reserved: 16MB (doesn't show up in Computer Management, but does in GPartEd)
  
• Windows C: drive (NTFS): 106GB used out of 244GB
• hidden diagnostic partition (NTFS): 9.76MB used out of 508MB
• Windows D: or Ubuntu /data (NTFS): 735MB used out of 1.1TB
• Ubuntu / (ext4): 78GB used out of 406GB

 

What timing, I just heard back from @Dell-Mano_G (I sent a message shortly after he invited such messages back in August).
Basically, he also pointed me towards this switch. The engineers think that maybe the caddy is not pressing down on the switch all of the way like it is supposed to in some cases. He suggested that I put some material under the plastic caddy to make it press down on the switch more easily. They're looking at a design change so hopefully this will be fixed (not sure if that will be in this system or a successor system).

My take, maybe the physical dimensions of some drives are slightly off and that could play a role into how well the switch is being pressed, and why I have the issue with some drives but not the Dell-supplied ones? I still haven't opened up my system to see precisely where this switch is, so I don't know if that makes any sense. I'll try to get to it in the next few days.

Anyway, maybe taping a piece of thick paper or something on the bottom of the drive caddy in the correct spot would help to make sure that the switch is always pressed down.

 

@alittleteapot Wanted to bring this switch to your attention as well.

 

I'm looking to install Linux on my 256GB drive because of the battery drain issue with the GPU that I have been experiencing. 3.5 hours of battery life is putting lots of unnecessary strain on the battery with my current use case.
Do I have to go through any steps to install Linux with Optimus? And would it be able to install correctly with the iGPU on?
I'm leaning towards Ubuntu for the distro, but that might not be the best choice.

 

Have you tried my method a few post back? I managed to resolve the battery drain issue cause by the GPU, now I can get 5.5h from the laptop