Dell Studio 1555, *Part 2*

If it will run with the T6600, then it'll run with the T4300.

 

The adaptive brightness should be good then. Also noticed it allows you to change the screen brightness from Windows as well as the keyboard function keys, like most other laptops.

 

Hi All,

Just a quick note to introduce myself, as I am new here. I have been looking through this thread for quite sometime now, and have been really keen to read up on the Studio 1555. I myself have ordered a Dell Studio 1555 (Stats as shown in Sig.) and am keen for it to arrive (as it hopefully will in the next few days). Just in case others are wondering, I ordered mine here in the UK, and have got the offical delivery date for the 18th Nov, only 10 days after ordering the laptop. This is very fast in my opinion, as I have not opted for an off the shelf model.

As far as Dell are concerned, despite hearing some worrying things when ordering the Laptop, I have had no problems, and have been quite impressed with their speedyness, the same goes for Walsh Western (the UK couriers). So so far (touch wood) everything seems good. Just thought I would post to help settle others nerves if like me they are a little anxious after reading such a long thread about the laptop, lol. Keen to recieve the laptop now, and am hoping not to have the problems listed above.

One question however, my Laptop shipped on the 11th, so Im guessing it wont have the new A08 Bios update. If I find (hopefully) no problems with the laptop, is it worth undertaking the update, or is it best just to leave it?

Cheers all, and thanks in advance!

 

I installed the BIOS update and haven't had any problems. It's nice to be able to adjust the brightness now.

 

Did you get your laptop pretty recently then? Just trying to work out if its worth it or not? I have always been sceptical when dealing with or modifying the bios of a system.

 

I got mine Oct 22 (yes, the day Windows came out, lol) and got it a week later. It came with the A07 bios and I updated the bios to A08 a few days ago. I wasn't haven't having any problems before the update, I just wanted to have the most current drivers and to enable adaptive display.

 

Will the graphics card (512MB ATI HD 4570) have problems playing HD 1080p .MKV files and Blu-Ray movies?

Thanks, I'm thinking of buying it.

 

hd4570 is enuf for HD movies

 

I don't have any Blueray movies to try, sorry. It shows my HD camcorder files fine though.

 

It plays my blu-rays fine, with some power to spare!

 

How much bloat ware and useless software comes on these stock?
I ordered my wife one with their sale a couple weeks ago, it shows up Friday, and sits under the Xmas tree until Dec. 25th.
I'm just curious how much junk software I should expect to have to remove on Xmas morning for her.

When I buy Dells I usually clean format the HD and reinstall only the OS & drivers and pick my own software from there on out. Thinking I'll probably just do this right off the bat as usual, hasn't failed me yet.

 

You don't get hardly any bloatware on them to be honest. Certainly nothing like buying a rebranded machine from a retail outlet.

 

Yeah, when I got mine, I expected to have to uninstall stuff but I actually couldn't find anything useless to uninstall (though I did switch off the Dell dock, just because I felt like I wouldn't use it much).

 

Hi All, I am close to pulling the trigger on the Studio 15. The specs are perfect for me so no issues there. But I've read about the screen flickering issue and having to upgrade the BIOS. I am not as tech savvy as most in this forum are, and after my recent experience with a Lenovo Y550, I am hoping to get a laptop with few issues right out of the box. So is this laptop for me?

 

If you love yours as much as I love mine, you will be a happy dude. Also, upgrading the BIOS is as easy as installing Firefox or any other normal program.

 

Are you implying the adaptive brightness service?

 

Yes. With the new A08 BIOS, you now also have the new setting to dim display within Power Options.

 

I bought dell studio 1555!

I don't like the way dvd are put into.

I'm installing Win x64.
It says that there is 35 Mb of ram (OEM reserved) and 2 Gb reserved.
Can I format this ?

I can't set up 3 partitions: for example
50 Gb
250 GB
200 Gb

only 50 Gb and the rest 450 Gb.
Help

 

But according to the service description, the adaptive brightness requires a sensor to measure the ambient light. Does the 1555 come with any such sensor?

Monitors ambient light sensors to detect changes in ambient light and adjust the display brightness. If this service is stopped or disabled, the display brightness will not adapt to lighting conditions.

 

Not sure about the "service description". Here's the information regarding Adaptive Display Brightness from Windows 7 Product Guide.

 

Ok. Thanks

 

When I received mine I had 3 partitions:
30mb OEM reserved
15 gig Recovery
300 gig System (where the OS is stored)

I'm guessing the 30mb is for the HDD firmware? I can't think of anything else.

When you're running the Windows installer and it asks you where you'd like to install Windows, delete the recovery and system partitions. (I doubt you'll be able to do anything with the OEM reserved one.) It should then show up as 500gigs of Unallocated Space. Then just hit the button at the bottom to create new partitions of whatever sizes you want!

 

So I can't do anything wrong formating these 2 partitions like deleting bios?

 

Nope! The BIOS information isn't stored on the HDD.

 

just got my windows 7 upgrade disc for free in the mail.

how does upgrading work? do i have to reinstall my programs or does it not affect those?

worried about losing my adobe products and email programs.

 

Can you change the Fn key work?

For example, let F11 with one tap do this work, and Fn + F11 alternate.
Fn + F4 increase brightness and F4 just F4.

 

Yes, this is a setting in the BIOS.

 

Where precise, i can't see?

I have A07 bios. People say that A08 can mess up eject button so you can't eject dvd.

 

Just have a look in the BIOS settings. The setting should say "Function Key first". Select it and save.

A08 should have no trouble with DVD drive. It just adds the feature of adaptive display.

 

Thanks for fast repost

 

Gaming question:

Does it playing GPU intensive games, shortens the life of laptop?
If you play 2 hours per week, is this bad four longlivity of laptop?

 

If you have a car and you drive it daily, normal wear and tear does apply.

Your GPU is also an electrical equipment, but its MEANT TO play games. If you start caring about the life of your GPU from day 1, you won't be able to enjoy it ever. If you care enough, just care about keeping CPU, GPU and HDD cool and everything should be fine.

And yes, 2 hours per week is nothing. Even 2 hours per day isn't going to harm.

 

If you're going to be doing lots of heavy gaming, more like 10+ hours a week, a laptop cooling pad might put you at ease but I doubt its necessary. If you want to keep your eye on temperatures download Hardware Monitor and run it while you're gaming.

 

#If you have installed Quickset (which is installed as standard) then you can also change this without going into the BIOS. Press windows key + X to bring up the windows mobility centre. There should be an option in there to switch between function key and multimedia keys.

 

I had a 1397 I just replaced with a Intel 5300N AGN card

the 5300 has 450mbp/s and improved range so the claims, but man the internet is now flying with this card, I bought it from HK on Ebay for 12.99 USD to my house ( Dell wants $40 USD for it) Also it uses an extra antenna wire as well that should be in the Laptop unused. It is in the studios.

So a cheap upgrade if you want from Ebay but you have to wait 2 weeks to get it, well worth it.

I once asked if there was a difference and did not get anyone to tell me here, let me say within the first 5 minutes yes there is a noticeable difference!

 

Be careful of these eBay deals, I found these in a seller's feedback:

 

My laptop completely shuts down during any 3D applications...Yesterday I was playing Half-Life 2 Episode 2, and about half an hour in it just shut down...No warning, no slowdown before hand, just shut down completely. The shutdown is repeatable with any 3D intensive program. I'm using the latest BIOS and video card drivers, and I had the back of the laptop raised a bit for better ventilation. Has anyone else had this problem? I don't want to deal with tech support/sending my laptop in for repair in the middle of a university semester, so I'm going to wait until my break starts to contact them, if I don't find a fix before that.

 

Thats strange, the same thing has been happening with me when I was trying to play Left4Dead the other day. It would just randomly, and instantly, exit the game. No warning, no messages, it just exited. All the drivers were new, etc. What cured it for L4D was disabling Multi-Core support, but I don't know how you'd manage that for any other 3D app.

 

Maybe disabling the multicore support just meant producing less heat, and eventually even with it disabled it will crash? But on the other hand the temperatures Speedfan reported were very reasonable for a laptop, never going over 54 degrees celcius.

 

OK, I have a question. What type of hard drive temperatures are people seeing? This notebook here has the 500 GB 7200 RPM Seagate Momentus...and it's been running in the mid 40's and has just hit 50. Now I know that I shouldn't worry until about 55 degrees...but this still seems a bit high. My own notebook's Hitachi Travelstar runs in the mid 30s, and I've never seen it touch 50. Is this Seagate drive even reliable?

 

has anyone tried dragon age or CoD:MW2 on the 1555 yet?

 

im tried to play COD:MW2, and what to say, it was quite playable on FullHD and medium/low details, but if you like more FPS lower resolution helps it a lot, and you can raise some parameters from low to medium - its up to you, but definetely, this game is playable with my studio

Btw, i recommend do all Windows 7 users flash to A08 bios, display dimmer after inactivity is very cool thing and can save some battery life

 

Very soon my new Dell studio 1555 will arive but is it wise to do a clean install of windows 7 because of the bloatware? or is the bloatware embedded on the Dell oem CD of windows 7?

 

My studio was shipped with preinstalled Windows Vista SP1 Home Premium. Interesting that it was pretty clean - only drivers, no docklets, no toolbars etc... But i have installed Windows 7 PRO from my MSDN school account, so with Windows 7 i cant help you.

 

Hey guys,

Getting my first laptop soon after i recently sold my mid-range gaming desktop (just wasn't using it for games anymore since i got my 360). I have been looking around and im pretty set on the Studio 15 from the Dell Outlet in the UK (the Acer 6930/6935G for can had second hand around the same price as the 1555, but there is something telling me not to get the Acer after I had seen the good build quality on other Inspirons from Dell).

Just wondering, im pretty sure the Radeon 4570 is GDDR3 right? Also, the only game that i can think of playing on the PC in the future will be Diablo 3, now i know its awhile off and no kind of specs have been released, but do you guys think the 4570 will play it decently?

I can only spend around £400 on a laptop, and a Studio 15 with T4300, 3Gb ram, 250Gb HDD, Radeon 4570 512mb is exactly £400 from the Outlet store, which i think is a pretty good deal. How long will these laptops last? Cause i don't really fancy having to upgrade all the time like i did with my desktop, granted I only upgraded to play games which i don't anymore on the PC.

Cheers!

 

hii.....my one finger zoom is not workin......i had enabled one finger zoom instead of pinch zoom..but after enableing circular scrollin one finger zoom is not workin any more....though i have disabled circular scrolling.....when i try one finger zoom it performs circular scrolling...but there is no such problem with pinch zoom...please help

 

@DeXeS
There really is no need to do a clean install of Win7, in my experience there hasn't been enough bloatware to make it worth the time. I got the Win7 upgrade disk and its completely free of bloatware.

@Nymins
There's no way to say for sure whether Diablo3 will run well on your computer, but since its an RTS chances are its going to be processor intensive. The T4300 is a pretty low-spec processor so that would be the only thing that would hold you back. But again, its all speculation.

 

Could someone do me a big favour and run ATITool's 3D view and GPU-Z's sensors? I think my crashing problem is coming from the GPU overheating, just 6 minutes in and the core is at 86 degrees celcius!

 

@ tipoo
Got a link to the tool?

 

For ATITool
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/436/ATITool_0.26.html


For GPU-Z
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/SysInfo/GPU-Z/


I just spent an hour on the phone with tech support...She "updated" the Bios to the version I already have, installed Catalyst (not the one from dell, the one from the ATI website), installed catalyst again for some reason, then told me they would call back again tomorrow to see if it was fixed. It wasn't, I still have the same problem. And she told me that tommorow, if I still have the problem they would revert back to the factory settings (which wont work since I had the problem since I got it) and if that doesnt work they will ask me to reinstall Windows 7 (which again wont work since I DID reformat and reinstall when I got the disk, and had the problem before and after). I'm going to see if I can convince them to skip on those two steps and just fix the problem, which is clearly a hardware one.