[HN Gopher] Dell deletes Latitude CPU Throttling issue after lin...
___________________________________________________________________
Dell deletes Latitude CPU Throttling issue after link is posted
here
Dell deletes Latitude CPU Throttling issue after link is posted
here. Dell's new Latitude 5420/7420/7520 Notebooks have a ongoing
issue where their CPU are severely throttled when running on any
Linux distribution, even on Ubuntu OEM Certified System according
to some reports at the forum. After a link to the Dell forum post
was ported to HN, the post mysteriously was deleted in the same
day. Many users of this model posted to the forum thread since last
year and so far no solution was provided and we only received very
unenthusiastic responses from Dell support. Shocking to see this
apparent action to hide the problem. Originally Here:
https://www.dell.com/community/Latitude/Latitude-5420-7420-7...
You can still see it on Google Cache
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PFSFF4...
Screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/Va8EMMA
Author : hdiniz
Score : 527 points
Date : 2022-02-14 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
| progman32 wrote:
| Solid utilitarian laptops seem hard to come by these days, what
| with the S3 removal fiasco and the desire for making an aesthetic
| statement over function. My work Dell Latitude (came from the
| factory with Ubuntu) isn't particularly stable. The machine will
| randomly power off (under light workloads or heavy - no obvious
| difference) with full battery and will not power on again until
| it's connected to the power brick. Once it's powered on I can
| disconnect the power cable again and be good for a few days to
| weeks. It's not an obvious thermal issue because I regularly run
| 100% all-core workloads and it's fine (thermal throttles, but
| fine). It also burns through a full battery after a weekend of
| sleep.
|
| On a whim I upgraded an old hand-me-down ThinkPad T430s to the
| classic 7-row keyboard since I had one lying around, and I'm
| finding myself using that machine more and more. Planning to
| upgrade its screen soon. Not all older laptops are good, of
| course, but the T430s with the upgrade feels like... a computer
| fit for getting things done. Everything gets out of the way. Full
| of utilitarian touches. For example, the lid's profile conforms
| to the palmrest's downward curve, giving it a functional
| sunshade.
| tome wrote:
| Given the anti-Dell pile on I wanted to give my alternative
| experience.
|
| I've been a very happy Dell user for at least 15 years, maybe 20.
| In that time I've had at least four Dell laptops and at least one
| workstation. I've never experienced any significant problems.
|
| My latest machine is an XPS 7390 that I use with Debian
| GNU/Linux. S3 suspend to RAM works fine. In fact, everything
| works fine. The build quality seems fine, though it's only one
| year old, so time will tell I guess.
|
| I wrote up my experience: http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/how-i-
| use-debian-dell-xps-13...
| exikyut wrote:
| _Whoa_ , this has 95 points after only 20 minutes.
| nixcraft wrote:
| I had a similar experience with Thinkpad X1E 2nd gen (I tried
| both Arch and now on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, soon to jump to 22.04 LTS
| pre-release). It throttles heavily despite being certified as a
| Linux device. Before that, I used Dell precision with RHEL (later
| CentOS), which worked wonderfully. But the precision line is so
| expensive. So next time, I will try to get System76.
| infberg wrote:
| Not sure whether you are aware but this issue seems to affect
| different vendors like Lenovo as well who can't find a solution
| neither.
|
| The same issue is being reported all over lenovo linux forums as
| well and for example on
| https://github.com/erpalma/throttled/issues/255 you see lots of
| lenovo people reporting the same.
|
| I personally suffer the same issue on my X1G9, the best fix so
| far is the unload/load all related kernel modules one which makes
| throttling at least only drop to 1.2 Ghz.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Wow I just ordered an refurbished E6430 to use as a Linux server,
| does it suffer from the same issue? that's nuts. Why the f would
| Dell do that?
|
| archive of page 1: https://archive.fo/5iQCF
|
| There are 14 pages or so, I suggest people save every page of the
| discussion still in google cache and archive it, for instance
| page 2:
|
| https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JO-IqO...
|
| https://archive.fo/9BYs4
|
| Since Google cache might be deleted at Dell's request. Don't just
| use screenshots, these can be easily doctored.
|
| edit: corrected the model's name.
| xuhu wrote:
| If you mean E6430 (model from about 2014), mine isn't
| throttling. It does get hot though.
| pomian wrote:
| Have had very good luck with all dell refurbished laptops,
| these last many years. Possibly they are better, because
| anything broken, is fixed.
| egberts1 wrote:
| canned response (Feb 2021)
|
| https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000139695/balanced-...
|
| Just move on when shopping for a laptop.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| The link on the first post to another Linux issue is also not
| there.
| https://www.dell.com/community/Latitude/Latitude-7420-thrott...
|
| Maybe someone did a delete where post like '%Linux%'
| ILMostro7 wrote:
| I'm not seeing any posts in any of the community threads. Not
| sure what the reason is, although we could always speculate
| with more or less reasonable certainty. Might as well just sit
| back and wait :shrug:
| fguerraz wrote:
| The solution is
|
| https://github.com/erpalma/throttled/
|
| Been using it on various XPS laptops for years.
|
| Sadly it requires support for MSR writes which are being slowly
| deprecated by the Linux kernel. I believe the same should be
| achievable with thermald be I haven't been able to be bother yet.
| sam42 wrote:
| Unfortunately, "throttled" does not fix the problem on these
| particular models. See
| https://github.com/erpalma/throttled/issues/255
| bitcharmer wrote:
| The restriction on MSR writes from the kernel people is just
| nuts. It's like they are saying: we know better, you're stupid
| and shouldn't be doing this so we just won't let you.
|
| I'm still fuming.
| halz wrote:
| Context: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/
| tip.git/...
|
| Writes to arbitrary MSR are still allowed by linux, but it'll
| squawk a warning with the PID from what poked the MSR. What
| has been preventing writing to MSR is microcode updates
| (loaded via Linux via initram/firmware, or via the vendor in
| a BIOS update), such as the one(s) in response to plundervolt
| https://plundervolt.com/ Writing to the plundervolt-related
| MSR was particularly helpful to undervolt a thermal-throttled
| laptop. So! Can either downgrade the BIOS and/or rollback the
| microcode that your distro is loading during boot.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Thank you for providing context and some background. There
| are so many legitimate uses for wrmsr I still think this
| move from kernel devs is quite openly user hostile.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| For those, like me, who uses Firefox + uBlock Origin + NoScript
| and can't see the image on imgur, because of their shitty
| antiblock (@hdiniz - stop using that crap for images), I uploaded
| to postimages. I had to open Edge (bleah!) to view the image on
| imgur. Here it is:
|
| https://i.postimg.cc/1396wMSb/Dell-HN-Issue.png
|
| LE: I had to disable both NoScript and uBlock for me to be able
| to see their pop-up and after clicking on it, the image loaded
| properly on imgur. Still a shitty site IMO.
| bityard wrote:
| I use Firefox + uBlock and can get to everything on imgur just
| fine.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Like I said in the edit above, I had to disable both to see
| their pop-up. Clicked accept (what else to do these days,
| it's a joke), enabled back and can see as well.
| pmontra wrote:
| Thank you for the effort. Unfortunately the image I see on
| postimg is 241x800 px. The image on imgur is 1908x6336 px. Deep
| link: https://i.imgur.com/IS9mH3l.png
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Yeah, initially postimages was full as well, now I see it got
| resized
| ILMostro7 wrote:
| Why is this ranking up so much? I see a number of mistakes in the
| assumptions and claims from the posts in the original link (https
| ://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PFSFF4...), for
| what it's worth.
|
| That claim that the xps13 is also being throttled, for example.
|
| Product Name: XPS 13 9310
|
| minimum CPU frequency - maximum CPU frequency - governor
|
| CPU 0 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance
|
| CPU 1 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance
|
| CPU 2 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance
|
| CPU 3 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance
|
| CPU 4 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance
|
| CPU 5 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance
|
| CPU 6 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance
|
| CPU 7 400000 kHz ( 8 %) - 4700000 kHz (100 %) - performance
|
| 3.83 GHz
|
| 580 MHz
|
| 3.12 GHz
|
| 1.68 GHz
|
| 3.63 GHz
|
| 3.13 GHz
|
| 2.82 GHz
|
| 875 MHz
|
| These posts are showing up too quick for people to even consider
| the situation at hand. Instead, just eager to air their own
| grievance and jump on the bandwagon. Not to say that I don't have
| my own negative experiences with them in the past. Nevertheless,
| it's a fascinating development to see in real-time (more or
| less).
|
| I'm not seeing any posts in any of the community threads. Not
| sure what the reason is, although we could always speculate with
| more or less reasonable certainty. Might as well just sit back
| and wait :shrug: rather than jumping to conclusion right away.
|
| Maybe I'm just too cynical when it comes to trusting mob
| mentality.
| aborsy wrote:
| How about the precision line? It better supports Linux.
| StopDarkPattern wrote:
| Dell did this for years with my Alienware and has never been able
| to produce a working laptop
| mjg59 wrote:
| The conflict between the market wanting systems that are (a) as
| small and light as possible and (b) as fast as possible means
| that modern systems are designed to have close integration
| between the platform and the OS to perform appropriate thermal
| management. If the OS doesn't indicate that it supports doing
| this, the hardware will run in a much more constrained mode.
| Apple can do this without too much trouble since they implement
| the whole stack, but it's more complicated in the PC space. Intel
| have a spec called Dynamic Power and Thermal Framework (DPTF),
| but the useful part of it is the adaptive thermal policy, and
| Intel refuse to publicly document it.
|
| I reverse engineered a chunk of this
| (https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/54923.html) and it got merged into
| Intel's Thermal Daemon (https://github.com/intel/thermal_daemon)
| which /should/ improve things, but it's complicated by this
| mechanism allowing for vendor-specific controls that are usually
| implemented by having a background service running under Windows
| that triggers them.
|
| There's multiple things that can be criticised here: 1) Intel
| pushing OEMs to adopt a technology that they (a) don't document
| and (b) don't write proper Linux support for 2) Canonical not
| making it clear that OEM certification only requires that the
| system work, not that it work as well as it does under Windows 3)
| Dell not figuring out a decent solution for this, even for
| systems that they nominally support Linux on
|
| Dell could build hardware that doesn't rely on adaptive thermal
| management, but that hardware would either be bigger or slower
| than competitors' hardware. Fixing this unilaterally is hard - we
| need an open spec that's implemented by both hardware vendors and
| integrated into mainstream Linux distributions. Given where we
| are, the easiest way to get there would be for Intel to publicly
| document DPTF.
| viraptor wrote:
| Have the kernel patches you mentioned in the post been merged
| already in some form? Or is that required for a hacky solution?
| mjg59 wrote:
| They're merged, and if you're running a current version of
| Thermal Daemon then things /should/ be better than they were.
| But most policies don't actually explicitly modify the
| throttling temperature MSR, and Windows definitely defaults
| to a different value there when compared to Linux, so there's
| something more going on.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> modern systems are designed to have close integration
| between the platform and the OS to perform appropriate thermal
| management._
|
| What does this mean in practice for a standard laptop?
|
| I mean, every laptop supports the classic "turn up fans when
| CPU gets hot" and "throttle CPU if it gets very hot" - is that
| not sufficient to let the CPU operate as fast as the laptop's
| thermal design will permit?
| horsawlarway wrote:
| no, unfortunately it's nowhere close to sufficient.
|
| Power management on various chips is a complicated subject,
| and most modern laptops do a _LOT_ of things to try to draw
| out battery life as long as possible.
|
| If you want just a brief idea - take a look at
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management
|
| If it helps, you can think of thermal management and battery
| management as directly related (that heat is coming from
| somewhere, and it's the battery in the laptop - the more
| heat, the more energy being consumed [or wasted].)
| mjg59 wrote:
| Trivial example: you want to avoid the exterior of the laptop
| getting hot enough to be uncomfortable for the user. If you
| support adaptive policies, you can read the skin temperature
| sensor and then only throttle the CPU if that's above a
| certain temperature. If you want to get more fancy, you can
| make that temperature conditional on whether there's a dock
| attached or not (if the machine's sitting on the desk then
| the bottom temperature can go higher than it could
| otherwise).
|
| More complex example: the wifi chipset also produces heat.
| The platform designer should take into account what the
| effect of CPU thermal output is on the wifi chipset, and
| expose that information in a way that the OS can make a
| decision about whether the appropriate response is to
| throttle the CPU or allow the wifi chipset to throttle
| itself. Making that decision is going to depend on the
| current workload, so you don't want to try to implement this
| in firmware.
|
| If you don't support adaptive policies, then you just
| restrict the CPU such that even under worst case scenarios,
| the components can never exceed the desired temperature. Of
| course, this means that you're (generally) running slower
| than necessary.
| mattst88 wrote:
| Exactly. When I was at Intel (working on the Mesa 3D drivers
| for Linux) we would routinely get reports that performance was
| less than on Windows and ultimately determine it was because on
| Windows the thermal limits would be set to e.g. 45W but on
| Linux we'd be stuck at 35W.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Dell visual design is great. Anything else sucks. I had to
| heavily mod my dell XPS 13 with heat pipes, thermal putty and
| thermal pads to make it not throttle. It's literally 20!!!!
| degrees cooler now and never throttles. It's unbelievable that an
| amateur like me can run circles around their design. Picture for
| the interested: https://imgur.com/a/SfaI0RA
| jjgreen wrote:
| Years and years ago I was given a Dell (Pentium I?), it was
| running a bit warm, so I got a suitable fan for that (standard)
| motherboard. When I opened the box to install it, I found that it
| was not quite standard, the extra-fan power socket was not there.
| After some research I discovered that Dell ordered special
| versions of standard motherboards with only the bits that they
| were using in their models, shaving a few cents off the price. I
| determined to avoid Dell ever since (so avoided the whole
| "exploding capacitor" thing of the early 2000s).
| Delk wrote:
| My memory isn't the best but I'm under the impression that not-
| quite-standard or otherwise crappy solutions were fairly common
| in major brand desktop PCs of that era.
|
| I'm not defending those solutions, and I don't know if Dell's
| builds were even more limited than some other brands or not,
| but I doubt those kinds of issues were unique to them.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| There was another round of exploding caps in the mid-late 2000s
| as well. Or at least, the batch of hundreds we worked on had
| those issues.
| jjgreen wrote:
| I did a 4-month stint as sysadmin in a University which was
| exclusively Dell in the middle of the great capacitor plague,
| dozens of machines sent back every week, they stopped asking
| why and just replaced them. Happy days :-|
| auxym wrote:
| I had to Dremel out a Dell desktop case to fit a standard ATX
| power supply, circa 2005.
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| Doesn't surprise me. We had a few Dell AIO's in our office and
| whenever the CPU was under high usage for more than 15 minutes
| the motherboard would start malfunctioning. USB ports would stop
| working, built-in screen would flicker or short out entirely,
| etc. As soon as the CPU usage let up, all the issues went away
| and it would work normally again even without a reboot. Same
| behavior, multiple identical models in our office doing the same
| thing. Clearly a design defect/flaw.
|
| Dell's solution? Replace almost every part under warranty under
| numerous repairs. As expected, issue still persisted and support
| had no explanation. We had no luck trying to escalate the issue
| as a design flaw. We decided to cut our losses and just order new
| PCs that weren't AIO's since they wouldn't be thermally pushing
| the limits.
| halz wrote:
| A helpful utility to run before you get too deep into trying to
| run Linux on some hardware is the 'Firmware Test Suite';
| https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FirmwareTestSuite
|
| It runs an impressively large suite of checks and can help
| identify areas of platform insanity, such as regions of ACPI
| tables that are wholesale missing or otherwise don't make sense
| per the specs. Ideally while your laptop is under a premium
| support care package, you can relay this report output to the
| vendor and keep after them to fix things. If you do not have
| support or the device is older, you may have some success with
| back-porting sections of ACPI tables from similar platforms (e.g.
| the XPS and Precision lines are very similar).
|
| In some cases the Intel ACPI Source Language (`iasl` ) compiler
| used in Firmware Test Suite will have false-positives/negatives
| if the ACPI table was initially compiled by Microsoft tooling.
| You'll see mention of `MSFT` in the ACPI table dump during boot
| (via dmesg).
| secondcoming wrote:
| Back when I managed to get OSX running on VMWare Player I
| recall having to edit some of the DSDT stuff to get the battery
| indicator to show on the desktop!
|
| It still boggles my mind that there's a virtual machine
| interpreter running in kernel mode.
| pcurve wrote:
| I've been at the same company for almost 2 decades. 5 years into
| my tenure, some genius had a bright idea to move away from IBM
| Thinkpad. Each time, it's bee a failure.
|
| IBM Thinkpad (years and years) -> Dell (3 years) -> HP (3 years)
| -> Back to Lenovo Thinkpad (for the past 5-6 years)
|
| Mind you, they didn't go with cheap HP or Dell. They were pretty
| expensive stuff...
|
| Thankfully, I missed the Dell and HP wave because I held onto my
| Thinkpad T61 for almost 8 years before they finally pried it out
| of my hands.
| sjcoles wrote:
| My 5420s (~50 of them out of a ~200 laptop fleet) with an
| i5-1135g7 on Fedora Rawhide and CentOS 7 (with mainline kernel)
| don't seem to be affected by this, BUT I have a couple 5490s with
| 8656u CPUs that are.
|
| I should note that the 8656u CPUs have been nothing but trouble
| (multiple mobo replacements and still have suspend issues).
| [deleted]
| pacohope wrote:
| How much you wanna bet it's nothing nefarious? Just the
| performance of the forums is so terrible that the extra traffic
| was clobbering them and they just deleted the post to get load
| back under control. :)
| blueflow wrote:
| torch & pitchfork store...
| rootsudo wrote:
| if only the userbase of ubuntu users and people who paid more
| for the XPS linux edition cared.
|
| But, no. I agree, it's not good but Dell has a history of doing
| this and other dodgy updates/implementations for their EFI.
|
| But I did have a similar issue with Dell XPS 13's 9350, 9360 if
| I used a non -oem battery, on ubuntu and windows 10, immediate
| throttle even if I disabled speedstep. Only going to an OEM
| battery did it fix the issue - though I know 100% this is not
| related as the users are new laptop purchases.
|
| Still my 9350 experience was great outside that.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I have a new precision with, I guess, no power management. Query
| pwrcfg and it offers up hibernation. Period. Windows suggests I
| look in the bios, but if additional sleep modes are available
| there, I've yet to find them.
| tonto wrote:
| I forget where I got this from but this is an alias you can use
| to check your CPU speeds
|
| alias cpuspeed="watch -n.1 \"cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep
| \\\\\"^[c]pu MHz\\\\\"\""
|
| prints out current mhz on all cores, normally you'll see in the
| 2,000 mhz range (2ghz) and the 400mhz would be quite noticeable.
| for the record i have a dell precision 7540 with ubuntu from the
| oem and it has been a journey to make it workable
| bitcharmer wrote:
| This is the worst possible way to measure CPU frequency. Just
| use turbostat.
|
| https://www.linux.org/docs/man8/turbostat.html
| karussell wrote:
| what about nmon? (press 'M' to see the frequencies)
|
| for stress testing and monitoring you could try
| https://github.com/amanusk/s-tui
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Cool suggestions, thanks for sharing!
|
| Two reasons why Turbostat is my weapon of choice here. It's
| part of the kernel tools package which might be important
| if you don't have access to outside repos (think CoLo
| sites, etc).
|
| The other reason is acces to tsc frequency which is pretty
| important in my line of work.
|
| I'll definitely give s-tui a try. Looks really nice.
| sfteus wrote:
| Only somewhat related: I was provided a Latitude 5520 from my
| work, as they wanted everything to be done on company-owned
| hardware. I've had it nearly two years now, and it _still_ has
| two major issues.
|
| The first is it cannot hibernate; if it goes to hibernation, the
| CPU will run full throttle until the battery is dead. Sleep is
| fine at least, so I get by with just disabling hibernation. Not a
| huge deal as 95% of the time it is on my desk and plugged in.
|
| The second: you cannot unplug a USB keyboard while it is running
| or else the machine will hard-freeze and requiring a hard-reboot
| to recover. I originally set up a KVM switch for my
| mouse/keyboard to switch between my personal machine and work
| machine without having to plug/unplug a bunch of stuff, but it
| will automatically switch over if it detects one machine is
| active while the other is not, and that would usually end up
| freezing the Dell every night.
|
| Absolutely inexcusable all around for these kind of issues to go
| on this long. I have to imagine it's either solely
| warranty/service contracts, or simply sheer naivete on
| alternatives from large businesses, keeping Dell in business.
| temac wrote:
| I have an XPS 15 9560, something like 4 or 5 years old. It's not
| great, not terrible, bug getting more and more annoying. 1 or 2
| years ago, a mandatory major Windows 10 upgrade broke the USB3
| port (except 1 time every 10 connection attempts if you are
| lucky), and also the Wifi does not always resume when waking up,
| in which case a reboot is needed to recover.
|
| The thermal design and CPU freq selection is also far from
| perfect given it often throttles during ~10s every few minutes
| under constant load (sign the CPU freq under load is too high
| and/or the thermal dissipation is too weak)
|
| The general mechanical hardware quality is also inferior to a
| MBP. The keyboard marked the screen a little (still tolerable
| though).
|
| Given the XPS are supposed to be kind of flagships for Dell, I do
| not recommend Dell if you want a laptop that works and that is
| not a toy you intend to trash after 2 or 3 years. I wished
| reviewers talked about typical medium/long-term experience of
| brands and product ranges.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| I was thinking about buying a Dell XPS, glad I found this thread.
| Probably going back to a ThinkPad (the Acer I have now is ok but
| the build isn't as nice as my previous ThinkPad).
| macawfish wrote:
| This is more of an Intel problem than anything. For the longest
| time Intel has been increasing throttling instead of improving
| efficiency. Now that AMD and Apple have brought competition, and
| thanks to TSCM, upcoming Intel designs are starting to look more
| efficient, but Intel laptops from between 2015-2020 are mostly
| garbage if you're doing anything realtime in a warm environment.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Wow so there are a lot of comments here but uh can I just point
| out that _every_ post on Dell 's support forum is either 404 or
| 403 this morning, so I doubt it has anything to do with big
| conspiracy.
| amcoastal wrote:
| Is this a conspiracy? Or is the mod team on Dell's forums just
| ignoring their job and browsing HN front page all day :D
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| PSA: Archive a link (Wayback, Archive.is) that may be
| controversial to a corporate image before posting to social.
| nomendos wrote:
| My company provided Dell Precision 5750 i7-10875H 8core, 4K, is a
| beauty beast from the specs and looks.
|
| However I HATE IT with a PASSION because there is no way to make
| it quiet as it is LOUD!?
|
| In my opinion the whole thermal managing team should be _fired as
| incompetent_ and I speak from my indepth knowledge of working for
| Intel in a central Arch team in the past. I even meet a number of
| Dell key people presenting them what is coming and shared best
| practices how to do each part of the design. They used to do
| decent job before, but now seems incompetence has won. I am sure
| there are still lots of good engineers and people there, but
| result-wise team that did thermal management on 5750 SUCKS TO
| HEAVEN! In 5750 there is massive cooler, yet fans start going
| loud (mid-jet sound) when any audio conferencing or any ~5% CPU
| only load happens and CPU temperature is still well below 50C
| most of the time, yet this junk goes Wuuuhuhuuuuuusshshshshsss
| ALL OF THE TIME with rare bit quieter moments! I tried all
| setting such as Quiet in BIOS and in Dell Power Manager and no
| setting can help, just make it worse. CPU is 45W TDP one of a
| later gens. On top of all of the misery with this laptop, in BIOS
| they locked control of voltages, so ThrottleStop can not work!!!
| So they can "protect us" from Plundervolt, how ironical. There
| is no known bypass :-( I also tried turning off different number
| of cores and turbo, etc, nothing worked well enough. The only
| point when it started be more quiet for longer periods is when I
| left it with 2 active cores, turned off turbo, but that makes
| this machine stupidly slow!
|
| For god's sake, add if needed in BIOS option to disable dGPU and
| add "real Quiet" option that will make it lower TDP or whatever.
| Please ease off temperature thresholds as keeping it below 50C to
| start ramping fans to mid-jet-sound is RIDICULOUS, as with this
| massive cooler you can comfortably have thresholds ~70C or so and
| even allow undervolting.
|
| I ended up using it as a "decoration" and still use my personal
| T460p which has 6th gen i7 45W TDP CPU + dGPU, but BIOS still
| allows ThrottleStop and even without it T460p is waaaay more
| quiet than 5750, but with ThrottleStop nice stable setting I got
| it to whisper quiet and even faster.
|
| I contacted Dell on their forums but their arrogance seem not to
| allow them to do anything, but leave it as is! Sick situation and
| now I have to live with 5750 at my work next ~2.5y until next
| refresh and one thing is certain Dell NEVER AGAIN! I'll keep
| sharing this experience everywhere as this really made my life
| miserable. The only thing that can change that is that Dell
| either fixes this problem with public apology and/or fires the
| responsible team.
| rick1337 wrote:
| Today, Lenovo Support also confirmed on the phone that there is a
| throttling issue affecting the Thinkpad X1 Extreme Generation 3.
| They currently don't seem to have a clue what is going on...
| karussell wrote:
| Maybe https://github.com/erpalma/throttled can help
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| As a reminder: don't buy Dell, they have a history of ignoring
| issues and refusing to fix.
|
| The US needs to adopt EU-style consumer laws.
| Ecstatify wrote:
| 100% this. Have a dell XPS, laptop has been on a flat desk
| since the day I got it. Screen randomly starts getting
| distorted and is unusable now, had to buy an external display.
| The repair costs would be at least half the cost of what I paid
| for the laptop.
|
| They're supposed to be a premium laptop but after 2 years it's
| essentially a desktop.
|
| Windows hardware in general is junk. Saving for a MacBook at
| the moment.
| ratsmack wrote:
| I have a Dell EMC T40 that was working fine until a BIOS update
| caused an ACPI issue where one core would sit and spin on an
| inturrupt eating 60% of the CPU. The discussion on lkml is that
| it is a BIOS issue and they can do nothing. It's been two years
| now with two additional BIOS upgrades and it's still not fixed.
|
| Because of this, my newest laptop is a Lenovo... no more Dell
| computers for me, sorry Dell, not sorry.
| duffyjp wrote:
| My homelab runs on two T20's. 24/7/365 without issue and they
| sip ~ 25 watts from the wall with Xeon E3 L-series chips.
|
| They are pretty old though and just barely fast enough. Last
| year I ordered a Precision 3630 to test out as an upgrade. I
| was so disappointed by the engineering and build quality I
| requested a return the day it arrived.
| ratsmack wrote:
| I had a T30 that ran 24/7 for about 10 years but started
| having machine checks, but I was too lazy to see if it was
| fixable, so I just bought the T40 to replace it. The T30
| was a solid machine and I never had a problem with it. I
| can start to hear some fan bearing failure now in the T40,
| which means they're not using ball bearing fans and that
| really pisses me off.
| kenmacd wrote:
| I expected this before they shipped models running Linux, but
| thought I was safe now. I've learned my lesson.
| ehPReth wrote:
| What do you think of Lenovo or HP?
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Not sure about Lenovo, but I have been thoroughly unimpressed
| with my HP Pavilion. Granted, I'm a Mac user so my standard
| may be higher, but my Pavilion just _feels_ horribly cheap,
| the display flickers all the time, and the HP bloatware is a
| mess.
| dartharva wrote:
| Did you buy an HP product that's on the same price range as
| your Mac? Feels a pretty unfair comparison otherwise.
|
| That said, if not anything else, Lenovo provides the best
| laptop keyboards in my opinion. Perfectly sized, perfectly
| spaced, and give the best feedback out of all else. The
| thermals and overall build are also easily the best on my
| Ideapad than any other mainstream laptop I have used,
| though I'd concede I haven't really used as many laptops.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I decided to give HP another try back in 2016. I bought a
| Chromebook that promised Android support. As of 2022, it's
| still listed as "Planned".[1] It only lasted a couple years
| before the display completely quit working, so the Android
| thing was not the biggest problem.
|
| I would not have bought it without the assurance that I'd be
| able to run Android apps. Never a word from HP about the
| issue (and obviously no attempt to make the situation right
| after they lied). I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader
| to decide if you should give them your money.
|
| [1] https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-
| os/chro...
| luke2m wrote:
| HP feels cheap. Lenovo business models are excellent, but
| their consumer models aren't great. I would still buy one
| over HP or Dell though.
| karussell wrote:
| The Yoga Slim 7 is a great laptop for the money. (still
| soldered RAM)
| drcongo wrote:
| This was the received wisdom last time I had to use a Windows
| PC, and that was 20 years ago. I'm amazed they're still going.
| aborsy wrote:
| Once you achieve those, you have no companies to begin with.
| See EU.
| tarsinge wrote:
| I remember clearly that for years XPS were recommended here as
| good alternative to MacBooks, I am not in that market but I
| feel for people being burned by these bad advices.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I have an XPS running PopOS and it's fine. Maybe I'm just one
| of the lucky ones? I don't really push my laptops though as
| my job doesn't require it. Everythings seems fine for the two
| years I've owned it. Survivor bias?
| spideymans wrote:
| This really says something about the state of internet tech
| reviews. None of these reviewers ever keep their products
| long enough to experience long term issues. They'll keep
| recommending the XPS 13 (or other flawed products) to
| consumers, as long as no issues pop up in the week or two
| they review it.
|
| I suppose one good thing about Apple and MacBooks is that
| just because of how incredibly common they are, and the
| amount of mindshare they command, if there is a fatal flaw
| with an Apple product, there will be widespread consumer
| knowledge of the issues. On the other hand, models from Dell
| and these other manufacturers sell in low enough volumes that
| they can just keep pumping out broken products, and not
| enough people will care to hold them publicly accountable.
| bestouff wrote:
| Well, I still own an XPS 9360 which works wonderfully well
| under Linux. That's why at my current job I choose a top-
| of-the-line XPS 15 i9. Big mistake. That thing went through
| several support iterations (WiFi, motherboard ...) and it
| still locks up from time to time. I hate it.
| tomxor wrote:
| I've used an XPS 9370 with Debian stable for 3-4 years now.
| Compatibility has been good and performance more than enough
| for me, but my dev work doesn't require super high
| performance, IMO this is the wrong form factor for that
| anyway. I'm a minimal linux, i3wm type user so ... that's how
| low my requirements are for a decent desktop experience.
|
| My main gripes:
|
| For first few months wifi driver was unstable and would
| randomly cause kernel panics, sometimes once per day,
| sometimes once per week. (yes I tried manually installing
| newer versions and using different kernel versions)...
| eventually it stabilised and I haven't had any issue since -
| Even though this was not unique to this machine, it was
| annoying considering it was supposed to be _built for Linux_.
|
| The battery capacity diminished faster than anything I've
| ever owned... currently at 20% of original capacity. There
| was a very sharp drop last year from 80% to 60%, then another
| sharp drop from 60% to 40% which I'm guessing is the
| controller writing off cells. (Manually calibrating it by
| draining never gets it above 30%)... Speculating this is
| possibly from heat damage (sometimes I will play a game which
| will get it a bit hot) or just crap battery quality -
| expecting to find some spicy pockets when I get around to
| replacing it.
|
| Other than that it's been a solid Linux machine and very
| comfortable lightweight form factor to use. I still don't
| have performance issues personally, so will replace the
| battery soon and see how much longer I can keep using it.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > I'm a minimal linux, i3wm type user
|
| > sometimes I will play a game which will get it a bit hot
|
| Off topic, but how did you configure i3 to work nicely with
| gaming? Last time I tried i3 with programs that expected to
| be able to arbitrarily draw windows it didn't work super
| great.
|
| These days I use Pop!_shell where I might want to game, and
| Sway where I'll just want terminals and a browser.
| tomxor wrote:
| I'm a lightweight gamer, but i've never had any trouble
| with drawing gaming windows on i3... I mostly play old
| stuff or FOSS versions of old stuff e.g ioquake based
| games, openra, stuff like that.
|
| However i've also tried out steam occasionally and not
| had any issues.
|
| What kind of games have you had issues with?
|
| Note i'm using X11 still and no compositor, you mention
| Sway, maybe these are Wayland specific issues?
|
| [edit]
|
| > I tried i3 with programs that expected to be able to
| arbitrarily draw windows it didn't work super great
|
| Ahh, if you mean the game needs to draw multiple windows,
| yeah I've noticed programs that draw lots of floating
| windows can get into a mess, but I've not really used
| many of them often. I'm not sure why this is, it's not
| like they are using the i3wm default floating dimensions
| or anything.
|
| For games windows that start floating I usually just full
| screen them or drop them down into tiling mode. But then
| i've never played a multi window game.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > What kind of games have you had issues with?
|
| Mostly Windows games through Proton/Wine expecting to be
| able to take full control of the screen, and then having
| a panic attack when not allowed to.
|
| As far as programs wanting to draw many floating windows,
| that's happened with Krita/Inkscape more than games,
| games just... didn't play nice. I'd get crashes when
| changing workspaces, when launching a game, so on. That
| was on i3 itself as well, I didn't switch to sway until
| after I stopped trying to enforce tiling on everything I
| do (just most things :P )
| llampx wrote:
| Yup, I bought a Thinkpad after even 5 minutes perusing
| through both the Thinkpad subreddit and the Dell one revealed
| that Dells are plagued with issues and it is really just dumb
| luck if you get a problem-free unit, and their support is not
| helpful.
| bayofpigs wrote:
| Dell was the first pc retailer to earn my personal ban after
| showing their shady business practices followed quickly by
| Newegg a few months later. Life has been better ever since.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Somebody else might say the same thing about HP and Amazon.
| But it isn't much help to anybody else. If you steer somebody
| away from the frying pan and into the fire, what good was
| your help?
|
| What have you used since then that made life better?
| muh_gradle wrote:
| For that matter, don't buy HP as well. As a long time Apple
| hater, I finally changed to Macbook pros with Apple Silicon.
| The hardware quality from Apple is still consistently good.
| enriquto wrote:
| But what OS do you run on it? Is linux well-supported
| (regarding throttling, sleeping, etc)? I can't stand the
| macOS gui.
| bedast wrote:
| I started a new job recently. Previous job had me on a Dell
| Latitude that had such poor thermal handling that the fan was
| constantly at full blast even under light use, and had
| throttling issues. Previous Dell laptops through them had
| various other faults (RAM was replaced twice in one machine,
| went through probably 6 or 7 docks, etc). After nearly a decade
| of various Dell laptops at that job, the new one offered the
| choice of a Dell or a Macbook. Not a fan of macOS, but I don't
| dislike it enough to avoid getting another garbage computer
| causing me endless headaches.
| YaBomm wrote:
| jseliger wrote:
| That seems like it might go too far--their XPS 13 Linux laptops
| have gotten good notices--but I did marvel at this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952. Sleep/wake
| doesn't work properly on large numbers of laptops in 2021 and
| 2022?
| ohazi wrote:
| This is Intel's doing, on Microsoft's behalf. There was a big
| push to replace the old/"normal" sleep (S3) with "modern
| standby" (S0ix).
|
| In S3, the system controller powers down the CPU and
| nonvolatile storage while keeping RAM in a low-power self-
| refresh mode until you wake it up. Your operating system is
| not running -- the microcontroller that reads the lid sensor
| and power button determines when the laptop will resume.
|
| In S0ix, the CPU is still running, and the OS kernel is
| supposed to put itself into a low power state most of the
| time, while periodically doing things like checking email and
| performing updates. The lowest power state still uses gobs
| more power than S3, and Microsoft is aggressively
| irresponsible about when and why it wakes up. It's more like
| "turning off the display and spinning down disks after
| inactivity" and less like a real sleep state. Windows is
| running the show 100% of the time, even when the laptop is in
| your backpack.
|
| All this because Microsoft was jealous that Apple can check
| email and download updates _without_ waking up using their T2
| system controller and now their own SoCs. But Apple is way
| less aggressive about waking up, their firmware is generally
| pretty okay, and T2 still uses less power than an x86 in
| standby.
|
| Windows, on the other hand, has to run on every PC, so they
| can't specify some crazy advanced system controller, nor does
| Microsoft have any control over the firmware it runs...
| Instead they had to ask Intel to add a new sleep state that
| puts Windows in the driver's seat, and in order to make sure
| it gets used and people don't "accidentally" get stuck using
| the "old" S3 sleep, they made it so that you can only have
| _either_ S3 or S0ix enabled, so all system builders would
| essentially be forced to switch. Some (Lenovo) offered a BIOS
| flag to surreptitiously switch between S3 /S0ix before boot
| time, but even that seems to be going away or broken lately.
|
| I have to believe that this will get better eventually, if
| only because the current state of things is so atrocious, but
| I wouldn't plan on buying a new laptop in the next 2-3 years.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Windows, on the other hand, has to run on every PC, so
| they can't specify some crazy advanced system controller,
| nor does Microsoft have any control over the firmware it
| runs... Instead they had to ask Intel to add a new sleep
| state
|
| Or stuff another embedded core onto those enormous CPU
| dies.
| zerocrates wrote:
| And my understanding is that the Windows band-aid for bad
| sleep power drain is to just hibernate after a certain
| percent of drain, so if "modern" sleep doesn't really work
| well on your machine you won't necessarily notice so much.
| mhitza wrote:
| I'm probably going to be on the lookout for an AMD based
| laptop next year (would be nice if frame.work would have
| AMDs by then).
|
| Is AMD in a better place regarding sleep states?
| Lio wrote:
| I have a XPS 13 9370. I've never had a problem with sleep
| wake... except that the Wifi doesn't always wake up from
| sleep.
|
| It's soldered in so can't be replaced.
|
| This is a laptop I bought with Linux support out of the box
| but I've given up expecting Dell to fix it. It's easier just
| to kill off and restart the wifi connection when it stalls.
|
| Given that I'm not sure I'd buy another Linux Developer
| Edition laptop from Dell.
| suby wrote:
| I have an xps 13 developer edition from 2016. It came with
| Ubuntu preinstalled out of the box.
|
| It was the worst linux experience I've ever had, and just a
| bad experience in general. They gave it a broadcom wifi chip
| which has poor linux support, no built in drivers out of the
| box so whenever I reinstalled I needed to connect an ethernet
| wire with a usb dongle to download the driver. The wifi also
| just had very poor reception compared to other laptops.
|
| Sound problems intermittently where half of the time it would
| have no sound on boot, and I'd have to continually reboot
| until it decided to work.
|
| They had an absolutely infuriating feature which adapted
| brightness levels of the screen so that if you transition
| from dark to bright it would gradually adjust. Except this
| feature was broken and it does the opposite of what was
| intended -- it instantly cranks the brightness up to 100 and
| then gradually adjusts down to what the beightness should be.
| Even if this feature worked properly it would be undesired,
| but it is broken in the worst way and there is no way to
| disable it on my model. I have spent many hours trying.
|
| The computer also arrived with the chasis mis-aligned. I
| couldnt plug anything in to any ports, we had to get a dell
| guy come in and reasemble the machine.
|
| The charger also stopped working after about 1.5 years. I
| bought a new charger but now the charging port only works
| intermittently.
|
| QA issues aside, you'd think that they would choose parts
| known to work well with linux but they inexplicably did not.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Dell XPS was my worst linux laptop experience. I'll never
| understand why it gets such high accolades.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| I've had a bad XPS experience, but I also have really good
| latitude 72xx and 74xx experiences.
|
| I think that XPS build is just the wrong machine for Linux
| and like someone else said the wrong form factor for poor
| power performance management.
| zerocrates wrote:
| I've had good experiences with the XPS 13's last two or so
| generations with Linux... I want to say with the 10 and
| 11-series Intel chips? I have an older, thicker XPS 13 that
| only ever ran Windows which never really gave any issues
| either, apart from its goofy side-bottom-chin webcam
| placement.
|
| But I also had several coworkers with the same newer
| 11-series XPS machines who got a series of lemons... Dell
| replaced the motherboards, but still.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Could never get sleep to work properly on 2 Dells in the last
| 2 years. Switched to hibernate on lid close and that seems to
| work.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| My Inspiron 5505 trackpad stopped working and Dell sent me a
| replacement. That didn't fix it and they determined it needed a
| motherboard. The replacement motherboard had some serious
| issues or didn't work at all (I can't remember, that was last
| year). They sent me a refurb 5515 in its place, and now it has
| locked up several times and has some weird ghosting/artifact
| stuff going on with the display.
|
| Unfortunately, I don't know of any good PC alternative to Dell.
|
| I just ordered a Macbook.
| yial wrote:
| I don't know your use case, but I have been very happy with
| MSI.
| voakbasda wrote:
| For Linux, I recommend System76. They stand behind their
| product.
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| Their product is clevo rebadges.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If they support it, who cares how it's made?
| technofiend wrote:
| frame.work also gets mentioned here from time-to-time as
| they support Linux [1], however reviews of the product
| itself are mixed, so this is not an endorsement, just an
| observation. I would read hn history and frame.work forum
| history before buying one for my use.
|
| [1] "...Framework Laptop is working without issue in Ubuntu
| 21.04.3+ (NOT 20.04.3) and Fedora 35"
|
| https://community.frame.work/t/official-linux-and-
| framework-...
| bradlys wrote:
| > The US needs to adopt EU-style consumer laws.
|
| I'm sure this will happen around the same time a wealth tax is
| implemented, universal healthcare is adopted, the US stops
| invading countries, and we stop subsidizing suburbs. (i.e.
| never)
| soperj wrote:
| You forgot the metric system.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I think that would need a lot of public buy-in, here in the
| UK we aimed to go fully metric in the '70s and it's still a
| mix to this day. Most things are officially metric but you
| still see a lot of informal use of imperial even among
| young people (height, weight etc) as well as quite a few
| official things like signs on roads and pints of draught
| beer in pubs.
|
| Given how politically polarised the US is it'd end up as
| political football too I think, in the UK opposition to
| going fully metric sometimes manifested itself as
| Euroscepticism and that was back in the '00s when we didn't
| have nearly such aggressive culture wars.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Given how politically polarised the US is it'd end up
| as political football too I think,
|
| it was a political football here back in the 70s when
| there was talk of metric adoption.
|
| i do hope that people like stewart brand (whole earth
| catalog, coevolution quarterly, how buildings learn etc)
| feel some level of shame for the role their proseltyzing
| against metric, in spite of the good things they also
| did.
| genewitch wrote:
| The US is metric for everything except casual
| conversation. In the same way that i see and hear people
| in the UK say "he weighs 18 stone" or whatever, but
| everyone knows what a gram and kilogram and metre is.
|
| There's some things where knowing the SI definition is
| irrelevant, like how many PSI a tire needs. Sure, knowing
| what that is in SI is useful if you're trying to figure
| out how much a car weighs, but if i'm at the gas station
| setting the pump to 35 doesn't really matter.
|
| Industry and commerce is conducted on the global
| standard, though. And while the average american might
| not know how to convert between kilometers and miles (or
| hogsheads or chains or ...), but knows 500km is far,
| 500kg is heavy, and 500l is a lot.
|
| Until the SI stuff is the largest part of labels, and
| people feel like paying a ton of extra taxes to replace
| every road sign in the entire country (there's
| millions!), it's never going to be a "metric" country.
| Just think of the logistics and cost of replacing every
| road sign, including "mile markers", exit number signs,
| distances on all US government roads (BLM, USDA,
| Forestry), overpass signs, speed limit signs and road
| paint - i don't see that happening any time soon. If the
| only benefit is "the rest of the world stops talking
| smack because we're backwater imperial measurement
| users", would you force everyone to pay for that?
| olyjohn wrote:
| I like some of our standards. Temperature is one of them. I
| like that 0 is cold as hell, and 100 is hot as hell. And I
| like the fact that in Fahrenheit, the degrees are finer.
| Don't have to set my thermostat in half-degree increments
| in my house.
| bradwood wrote:
| In Celsius 0 is also cold as hell and 100 also hot as
| hell.
| layer8 wrote:
| Depending on whether hell freezes over.
| novok wrote:
| I think preference that just comes from familiarly. In
| practice you don't set your temperature in half
| increments in places with Celsius, it's just 20, 21, etc.
| Most HVACs do not set temperature that accurately enough
| in a room anyway for 0.5C adjustments to actually be
| useful.
|
| If you come from a Celsius place and then move to the
| USA, you find it actually fairly annoying, because a
| bunch of useful numbers to remember is arbitrary as fuck.
| What is the freezing point again? 35, 37, 33? In Celsius
| it's 0 and very easy to remember. The freezing point is
| very useful, since you'll know if the rain will become
| snow if it's just under 0, or if ice will start forming
| on the road or not. Similarly what is the boiling point?
| 200, 205, 210, 212? vs. a nice round easy to understand
| 100. You can also think about how hot your water can be
| as a 'percentage of boiling', so 75 becomes 'hotness that
| is %75 the way to boiling'.
|
| Vast majority of the world also knows that -17 (OF) is
| cold as fuck, and there is nothing special about that
| specific number too! You would also know that -16 and -18
| are cold as fuck. Same with 38C (100F). 40C and 39C are
| also hot! And there are no unique properties about 0F and
| 100F, unlike 0C and 100C.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Most HVACs do not set temperature that accurately
| enough in a room anyway for 0.5C adjustments to actually
| be useful.
|
| The radiator thermostats I use have a 0.5 degC gradation.
| A 1 degC gradation would be too coarse as far as I'm
| concerned. That doesn't mean that I'd prefer Fahrenheit,
| but 1deg C is actually a quite significant step
| subjectively for environmental temperature.
| genewitch wrote:
| > Same with 38C (100F). 40C and 39C are also hot!
|
| you were doing so well until right here.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| My favourite distance measurement is neither metric nor
| imperial but _nautical_. A nautical mile is 1852 metres
| which approximates the distance of a minute of arc of the
| Earth 's meridians. A cable's length is 1/10 of a
| nautical mile which (depending on the definition used) is
| in turn about 100 fathoms. I know all unit systems are
| arbitrary, but for some reason it feels a bit less
| contrived than miles or kilometres to me.
|
| Having said that I've never actually used cables or
| fathoms in practice, only metres or feet for depth and
| nautical miles for distance.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| And while we are at it, drop this MM/DD date formatting
| nonsense!
| seizethegdgap wrote:
| ISO 8601 master race, checking in on 2022-02-14!
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| YYYY-MM-DD is the true path. It is known.
| apurtbapurt wrote:
| This is the way, that is naively sortable.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| Where it matters, the US already uses the metric system.
| Virtually all products are dual labeled, with good chunk
| being in metric sizes. The military uses metric
| exclusively, and so does most of the science community.
|
| But to force the people to go fully metric would take a
| genereration.
| oasisbob wrote:
| I'll believe the US is using metric when you can buy rice
| by the kilo, gas by the liter, paper in ISO sizes, and
| construction sheet goods in increments other than 8x4
| feet.
|
| Non-metric preferred sizes are embedded everywhere.
| not2b wrote:
| The Carter administration attempted to start a full
| transition to metric in the late 1970s. When Reagan took
| power this was killed and no one attempted to revive it,
| because it was turned into a nationalist thing, one of
| those things Republicans reflexively oppose.
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| > to go fully metric would take a genereration
|
| Longer than that, I'd say. I remember watching videos
| about the metric system when I was in grade school back
| in the 70's. ("You can measure how far from your car to a
| star -- with the metric system!")
| not2b wrote:
| You saw it in the 70s because that's when there was an
| effort (later abandoned) to convert the US to metric.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| I mean, not if there was an actual metrication effort.
| There isn't. Nobody's putting up any speed limit signs in
| kilometres per hour or using celsius for the weather
| forecast.
| genewitch wrote:
| not just speed limit signs. Mile markers, exit numbers,
| distance signs. There's millions of them all over the US.
| It would cost unfathomably (lol) large amounts of money
| to do that, and for arbitrary reasons.
| sixothree wrote:
| We officially switched to metric at one point. People were
| using metric. Specifically, nurses were using metric.
| Reagan put an end to it. And here we are.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen a doctor or nurse use oz for
| medication?
| sgjohnson wrote:
| Yeah, I was under impression that medicine is also one of
| the fields that exclusively use metric.
| genewitch wrote:
| there's not really "smaller than an ounce" that is
| commonly agreed upon, so milliliters for liquids and
| milligrams for solids wins out by default.
|
| Same thing with manufacturing. Most places switched to
| being able to do metric measurements by the 80s, but for
| older parts it's still in "thou" and other metric
| sounding divisions of inches.
|
| Drug dealers on the other hand talk about eighths and
| teenths, though. But everyone knows that a nickel is 5
| grams. Both literally and figuratively.
| virgulino wrote:
| Now you are pushing it.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| European nations have mostly gotten rid of wealth taxes. You
| want to know what happens whenever the US pulls back? Ukraine
| gets invaded.
| iqanq wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/1TQctN0.gif
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Except for Denmark. I don't even make that much and I'm
| already at top taxes (49 percent!)
| p_j_w wrote:
| >You want to know what happens whenever the US pulls back?
| Ukraine gets invaded.
|
| America hasn't even pulled back and we still can't stop
| Ukraine from getting invaded. Besides, preventing Ukraine
| from getting invaded isn't worth a whole lot of money as an
| American. We can not and should not try to be the world's
| police.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| At what point does "not being police" change into "ignore
| your friends getting mugged"?
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| To be fair they gave up nukes on the promise the US would
| defend them. Seems a bit shitty to take their nukes and
| then not do anything.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| If the US did all that then it would lose its unique charm
| and I'd have no reason to visit.
| martin_a wrote:
| Their USB C docks are _always_ delivered to users with a piece
| of clear film tape wrapped tightly around the USB plug.
|
| The tape is added by our IT department, because otherwise
| they'll have to replace the dock after two weeks because the
| plug just dismantles. Great build quality...
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| In my experience clear heat shrink tubing lasts a lot longer
| than tape.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| This x1000. A co-worker of mine just switched to Mac because of
| a horrible experience with a $4000 Dell XPS with a discrete GPU
| that had chronic overheating issues that seemed to be a design
| defect. Dell would replace it with a refurb and they all had
| the issue. Forums online showed other people all had the same
| experience. Dell just ignored it.
|
| Dell would die a quick death without corporate IT.
| tomrod wrote:
| I'm facing a similar issue on a Dell XPS 15, purchased in
| 2020.
|
| That, plus structural defects cause case flexing when picked
| up, resulting in the touchpad being inoperable and (more
| recently) freezing the system entirely.
|
| This is even when the pick up is very gentle -- the case
| flexes under its own weight. If I type too hard or rest my
| hands too heavy on the system it can also occasionally cause
| the issue.
|
| The issue started two days out of warranty.
| alias_neo wrote:
| Both my XPS 13 and XPS 15 rock on the table due to being
| flexed somehow.
|
| Last week I was sitting in a meeting and tilted my screen
| up a little on the XPS 15 so I could see past some glare
| from lights and the hinge snapped. It has the smallest
| little piece of metal at the point it snapped, about 3-4mm
| wide and 1-2mm thick, it was no wonder it snapped, so work
| had to give me a new XPS 15. The hinge itself is plastic-
| welded to the chassis so it can't just he replaced without
| the whole chassis being replaced.
|
| I was planning for my next laptop to be a Framework anyway
| but my (PS1600) XPS 13 is only ~2 years old so I am a
| little way from wanting to buy a new laptop just yet.
|
| This sort of behaviour from DELL is confirming that going
| Framework is probably the right choice.
|
| EDIT: Also don't get me started on the i9 / 4K XPS 15 a
| friend of mine bought that seems to want to kill itself any
| time it's switched on, and has never worked correctly since
| day dot.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Both my XPS 13 and XPS 15 rock on the table due to
| being flexed somehow.
|
| I've had XPS laptops all the way back in 2010, then 2013
| and then 2016 - they all rocked on a table, it's like
| Dell's factory is crooked and they are physically
| incapable of making an even laptop.
| tomrod wrote:
| It's a big shame. They have so many little details right
| but really wooshed on overall quality it appears.
| serf wrote:
| my XPS 15 7590 is dead flat. I have encountered ones that
| rock, but it's because the owners would slide them across
| tables and wear the rear 'table-leg' bumper unevenly. I
| tend to pick the laptop up and re-place it when I need to
| move it rather than slide, and i've had good luck.
|
| Now, I agree that kind of thing shouldn't have to be
| thought about as a wear item -- but it seems to be one.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>but it's because the owners would slide them across
| tables and wear the rear 'table-leg' bumper unevenly
|
| I assure you all of mine did that straight out of the
| box. When the second one did it I was like "Huh, what are
| the chances" but I almost expected it with the third.
| alias_neo wrote:
| I assure you I do no such thing, and two for two my XPS
| laptops "rock" on the table.
|
| Neither laptop has any wear whatsoever on the rubber feet
| from sliding them on a desk, or on anything else for that
| matter. I'm a software engineer, not a savage.
|
| From my rudimentary testing, the front right corner is a
| little bent upward compared to the rest of the laptop. If
| I touch that corner with one finger it rocks, on both
| models and on any level surface.
|
| Both of my machines are older than your 7590 but they
| both did it since new.
|
| I got a 2020 model this week when the hinge broke on my
| XPS 15 but I'm yet to test if it suffers the same issue.
| r00fus wrote:
| Remember when Dell was only in the black on their balance
| sheet because of Intel payola [1]?
|
| Is Corporate IT the real reason Dell continues to exist, or
| is it Intel?
|
| [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/07/de
| lls...
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Dell would die a quick death without corporate IT.
|
| Unfortunately Dell is cheap, make (or at least used to)
| fairly robust computers for their price with spare parts that
| can easily be found. Mac is much more expensive and good luck
| sourcing parts from other brands. Lenovo went downhill when
| they were sold off.
| tomp wrote:
| What do you mean? High-end XPS laptops were about the same
| price as equivalent Intel Macs - judging just by features
| (RAM, etc), of course MacBooks have much superior build
| quality.
|
| I'd reckon equivalent M1 Macs are much cheaper.
| tryptophan wrote:
| If you value your time >20$/hr macs are cheaper because
| you don't need to waste 20 hours fixing stuff.
| noasaservice wrote:
| And if you're OK with the "Apple" way of doing things.
|
| The moment you deviate, all bets are off.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| >> Mac is much more expensive
|
| I think that was a valid argument before Apple Silicon.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| To be fair though, it is physically impossible to run a
| discrete GPU on any reasonable workload without overheating
| in a chassis like the XPS. You simply cannot dissipate
| 100-ish watts on a continuous basis in that form factor.
|
| I guess it's a philosophical question whether Dell should
| stop selling these kinds of machines, or continue to separate
| those who ignore basic physics from their money.
|
| I have a semi-portable Dell Precision M6500 from 2011. It
| still runs and does what it should, but it weighs 4 kg and is
| 3.5 centimeters thick. Both those numbers are _twice_ that of
| an XPS 15, and it still throttles down the quad-core i7 after
| about 120 seconds at full load IIRC.
| neurostimulant wrote:
| What about using those cheap vacuum cooler attachments like
| the ones sold on Amazon? https://www.amazon.com/laptop-
| vacuum-cooler/s?k=laptop+vacuu...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > or continue to separate those who ignore basic physics
| from their money.
|
| This comes off as victim blaming.
|
| As a consumer, I would expect the hardware I buy to be able
| to dissipate its own heat. If it can't, that's a design
| flaw that Dell needs to either fix or stop selling the
| product.
| throw10920 wrote:
| The term "victim blaming" is overused as a piece of
| manipulative rhetoric 90% of the time, but in this case,
| I think it's completely accurate - as a consumer buying a
| product from a large company (as opposed to a shady man
| in a trenchcoat in an alley), you absolutely have the
| right to expect and demand that your purchase works as
| advertised, and the responsibility is on the _seller_ to
| ensure that their marketing matches reality.
|
| Actually, I'm pretty sure that false advertising is
| illegal in most countries, including the relevant one
| here (the US).
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > The term "victim blaming" is overused as a piece of
| manipulative rhetoric 90% of the time
|
| Going off-topic, but yup. It's not victim blaming to
| point out when a victim didn't even take normal
| precautions. For example, if you're crossing the street,
| then even if the walk signal says WALK, you should still
| be looking to make sure there aren't any drivers running
| the red light. While yes, if you get hit by a car, it's
| the fault of the driver, you still failed to take the
| necessary actions for self-preservation.
|
| Hell, there's a pedestrian crossing near me that isn't at
| an intersection, but has yellow flashing warning lights
| that turn on when you press a button. There's also a
| speaker that says "Cross street with caution, vehicles
| may not stop".
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| Some people prefer to buy a GPU and underclock it. Maybe
| you need fast GPU memory more than GPU compute cores for
| some algorithm.
|
| I do that with one of my GPU servers, because the
| alternative is switching to liquid cooling and that's
| more work than I want to put in right now.
| phonebanshee wrote:
| I have one of those too out in the garage. It runs a hobby
| CNC router, so it's basically bathed in very fine sawdust
| often. I'm astonished every time it actually boots up.
| Justin_K wrote:
| They shouldn't sell the hardware then.
| Retric wrote:
| Dissipating a 100W GPU isn't that difficult in a thin
| laptop, you can find plenty of companies doing so. Dell
| presumably has an issue because they don't want to redesign
| the internals to dissipate that much heat.
|
| Back when dual GPU's where still a thing they actually
| needed laptops to be thick or wide, but 100w isn't that
| bad.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| The commonality there is Intel. My XPS doesn't even have a
| recent driver package for its integrated Vega GPU because
| Intel refused to support it.
|
| Also, the 2017-2019 Intel MacBook Pros are poorly suited to
| "professional" workloads, throttling under load or if, get
| this, the "wrong" (Intel) TB controller is used. There are
| reproducible TB bugs that are abandoned, and I still believe
| T2/BridgeOS was Apple's response to Intel's poor security
| design; they were forced to design adversarially against
| components they couldn't trust.
| paulmd wrote:
| > The commonality there is Intel. My XPS doesn't even have
| a recent driver package for its integrated Vega GPU because
| Intel refused to support it.
|
| Intel website shows their most recent Vega M release is
| 1/27/22. If Dell isn't keeping their drivers up to date,
| that's their problem, but the Vega M drivers are out there,
| Dell probably just isn't putting out releases.
|
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19269/rade
| o...
|
| anyway, more broadly, this is, unfortunately, just AMD's
| driver support model. For the longest time they would not
| even put out iGPU driver updates for _their own_
| processors, instead offloading this responsibility to the
| laptop vendors themselves (who, of course, did not give a
| shit). i.e. exactly what 's happening with your dell.
|
| https://www.notebookcheck.net/Better-late-than-never-
| Radeon-...
|
| And I don't know what people really expect here - Intel is
| dependent on AMD for drivers, they absolutely cannot write
| and support a whole new driver stack for an AMD product, if
| AMD sandbags (like they did previously to OEMs) then Intel
| is pretty much stuck. AMD got shamed into supporting _their
| own_ products, finally, but they 're absolutely not going
| to give Intel an inch more than they are contractually
| obligated to. It's in their financial interest to make your
| experience as shitty as they can.
|
| Of course, it was probably a mistake for Intel to attempt
| to collaborate with their largest competitor, and they
| definitely should have made sure the contract was airtight.
| But there's really no good reason for these not to be
| supported by mainstream Adrenalin drivers.
| fredley wrote:
| Someone at Dell's presumably going to get educated about the
| Streisand Effect quite soon.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
| 89vision wrote:
| In 2013ish I had the XPS 13 "Developer Edition". It always felt
| extremely underpowered for the specs, so I wonder how long
| they've been doing this.
| rolph wrote:
| short peek at the internet:
|
| https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=dell%20lattitude%20thrott...
|
| it seems to have been a longstanding issue with not quite recent
| CPUs accross a number of models. the thermal throttling was not
| right.
|
| there are some fixes about:
|
| https://github.com/DivyanshuVerma/throttlestop-linux
|
| https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/dell-fixes-latitud...
|
| https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/579159/who-is-throt...
| razemio wrote:
| I am a huge fan of XPS laptops. Sad to see, this kind of
| reaction.
| mr337 wrote:
| Same here too, I'm on my third XPS. This is the same crap that
| gets pulled with non linux supported laptop and I sort of
| understand. But these are specifically Linux supported.
| AgentK7 wrote:
| Hi, hounestly i cant say why dell does this. even as a DELL
| Employee some questions and some decisions are not to my liking
| but theres only so much you can do as the little guy.
|
| My Policy is: Displays, sure i can go with DELL Servers (if i
| would need), why not
|
| Clients: i rather not (allthough i have a 5420 as my Company
| Provided Device and i kinda like it)
| numlock86 wrote:
| I haven't heard anything good about Dell for at least the last 15
| years. How come this company is still a thing? Even in the
| enterprise sector, at least from what I catch up here and there
| (mainly Germany), no one is contracting Dell anymore. I wouldn't
| say HP is any better, but it's a bit less ridiculous in most
| aspects at least.
| adra wrote:
| The last two laptops I bought were XPS 15s and they worked
| totally fine for the years I used them 2011/2015?. I'm planning
| a refresh this year for a new one. I have a 2019 MBP sent to me
| for work and it crashes at least 3 time a week. Like it or not,
| there is no objective value to how well or long lasting these
| products last, and the best we can do is require manufacturers
| to report defects/returns so that the public are informed, so..
| probably never happen unless the EU mandates it.
| brightball wrote:
| I've got a Dell Developer Edition Precision and I've honestly
| always been pretty happy with it, but I've never pushed it to the
| degree that I questioned its performance.
|
| I'll be paying close attention to this going forward though. When
| I bought 3 years ago I was between this and System76 because I
| wanted to buy from a company with Linux-first options...but this
| certainly has me concerned. I've been mulling a new machine for a
| few months now so this will certainly impact whether I consider
| another Dell.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Is this an issue with Dell, or an issue with Linux...?
|
| If the system shipped with Windows, I don't really think it's
| dells issue if Linux doesn't do proper thermal management.
| trevoristall wrote:
| Streisand effect in full swing
| smcl wrote:
| Yeah I'm in the market for a laptop and had memories of people
| vaguely posting positively about the XPS line I was gonna look
| into. But I'll probably pass and stick with a Thinkpad.
| Iolaum wrote:
| Framework cannot expand their laptop line up soon enough ;)
| claytongulick wrote:
| I ordered two Dell Enterprise Chromebooks for use in healthcare.
| It was pretty important that I get the managed enterprise version
| of this for HIPAA reasons. This was as an evaluation to order
| 20-30.
|
| The machines I received had the wrong OS on them, they didn't
| have the enterprise version.
|
| The "support" I received from Dell on this was easily the worst
| I've had in my career.
|
| Suffice to say, I will not be ordering the 20-30 additional
| machines, and won't be recommending any Dell products at any
| company I'm a part of.
| tverbeure wrote:
| I have a company provided 6 month old Dell Precision 5750. It's
| the worst POS I've ever had the pleasure to work with.
|
| I use it primarily to do remote desktop to my desktop at work.
| IOW: I don't stress it at all.
|
| - I already had IT replace the SSD because it would boot Windows
| but the screen remained black.
|
| - The trackpad is almost useless, with a lot of phantom clicks.
| Maybe that's because I've been spoilt by 15 years of MacBook
| trackpads.
|
| - Speaking of the trackpad, when you press it to click, it
| started feeling weird after a few days, as if something
| mechanical came loose.
|
| - After a few days of non-interrupted use (as in: not rebooting),
| the microphone stops working. Nothing else but a reboot fixes it,
| but I've just resigned to using MS Teams on my phone for voice
| and audio, and the laptop for screen sharing with volume set to
| 0.
|
| - It never goes into a low power state. I'm _only_ doing remote
| desktop and not running anything else, but if you 'd go by the
| noise of the fan, you'd think it's mining crypto at peak
| performance. When you check the control panel, the CPU load is
| just a few percent.
|
| - Recently it started hanging every few days, forcing another
| reboot.
|
| But, hey, the 4K display is pretty good and it even has a touch
| screen. Which I'm reminded off whenever my finger accidentally
| hits it. (Touch screens on laptops are indeed useless.)
| sp332 wrote:
| It's possible that you do have some kind of malware mining
| crypto. Or maybe they didn't install the thermal paste on your
| CPU correctly.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I'm sure it will mysteriously return shortly.
| mariojv wrote:
| I had a horrible experience with a Dell laptop a few years ago. I
| bought it because of the price/specs combination, but it had so
| many problems.
|
| The problems started with the purchase. My credit card had a
| security feature where they texted me to ask about a large
| purchase, and I had to be transferred to 3 or 4 different
| departments calling Dell sales support trying to get them to
| recharge my card. Then, I had to deal with the computer itself.
|
| The webcam was horrible, at an odd angle, and it displayed weird
| horizontal line artifacts that made me look like I'm on a bad 90s
| CRT monitor. The speakers were extremely glitchy until about a
| year of driver upgrades. The built-in microphone never worked
| without making me sound like a robot. The headphone jack never
| worked well, either.
|
| The final straw was last month, when I tried to join a Zoom call
| from my personal computer for the first time in a few years. I
| installed Zoom, connected my external webcam and headphones, and
| Zoom crashed. Then, the Windows audio driver itself crashed. I
| restarted, and Bluetooth wouldn't come up for me to connect my
| headphones. Finally, after _another_ restart, I was able to do a
| Zoom call with my external webcam and headphones.
|
| It was comically bad. I bought an M1 MacBook Pro the next
| weekend, and it's the best computer I've ever had.
|
| It's unfortunate, because I had a great experience with a Dell
| desktop in the mid 2000s, but their problems are really
| unacceptable. Stay away from Dell.
| ju-st wrote:
| The post on HN got 5 points so I don't know how likely a
| causation is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329842
| hdiniz wrote:
| The Dell forum post was going on for months now, with more than
| a hundred posts from owners and some Dell input. Why delete it
| it today, if not to prevent spreading to a larger audience
| outside owners?
| okl wrote:
| Maybe we can take this post as an opportunity to discuss
| alternatives, specifically to the Latitude 5420/7420/7520 series
| notebooks. What can you recommend?
| SSLy wrote:
| Zen 3 Thinkpads.
| sjcoles wrote:
| They have funky Realtek NICs though don't they?
| SSLy wrote:
| Oh, forgot about that :/
| bbotond wrote:
| I bought a refurbished Fujitsu Lifebook a month ago after 7
| years of using various Dells and Macbooks. The experience (on
| Linux) has been surprisingly smooth. Everything just works,
| zero overheating. The machine has thinkpad-like build quality
| but it looks nicer.
| voakbasda wrote:
| System76 provides good value, and they stand behind their
| product.
| getcrunk wrote:
| I had an XPS, top of the line with full warranty/premium support.
| Horrible experience. They swapped many models to a shitty wifi
| card that caused bsod. I had to spend over 15+ hrs with support
| to finally convince them the fix was to swap the card to the
| original Intel and not doing another system restore or reformat.
|
| Then the battery. Oh the battery. The computer would randomly
| wake up from hibernate and drain the battery till it was dead.
| This also caused premature drain. Guess what? Dells batteries are
| rated for less cycles (half compared to apple) and this seemed to
| coincide with the end of my warranty period (time to buy a new
| one) but it doesn't even matter because their premium support
| only covers battery replacements for the first year!
|
| And get this! They only sell refurbished batteries. Just
| everything about this company is trash.
|
| The XPS is a nice line. It is very premium, but only skin deep
| dest wrote:
| A 2015 Dell XPS 13 9343 is still running fine today. I replaced
| the battery twice, DIY-sourced on AliExpress. Stellar machine
| for the price (< 1000EUR at the time)
| hadlock wrote:
| The sleep issue is in firmware, was introduced in 2017, and
| any time the ability to use the correct sleep mode is
| introduced in firmware, it's quietly removed. The 2015 XPS is
| a great laptop, the 2017 and forward have significant,
| ongoing power management issues.
| quasse wrote:
| > Then the battery. Oh the battery. The computer would randomly
| wake up from hibernate and drain the battery till it was dead.
|
| I have a Precision laptop (absolutely top of the line business
| laptop that shares hardware with the XPS 15) that does this
| too. The only fix is to either keep it plugged in 100% of the
| time or perform a full system shut down any time it's going to
| be unplugged.
|
| It's extremely frustrating and has basically killed any
| usefulness the laptop has as a portable computer.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| We used to buy Precision laptops for 3D designers due to the
| need for a beefy graphics card, and I got the impression they
| were just heavier versions of Dell's regular crap. IBM was my
| preference before Lenovo, but now I have no idea if there's
| any premium Intel laptops left.
| verdverm wrote:
| Dell monitors are pretty nice and have high quality. About the
| only thing I'd buy from them though.
| photon-torpedo wrote:
| Yes... there are some nice models we'd like to buy. But we
| are business customers of Dell, and they tell us that these
| have 95 working days lead time (almost 4 months). While on
| their regular web page for consumers it says that these are
| available within 3 weeks. :(
| tomxor wrote:
| > Dells batteries are rated for less cycles (half compared to
| apple) [...] They only sell refurbished batteries
|
| Are there any decent battery suppliers that sell dell
| compatible replacements?
| saulrh wrote:
| The broken hibernate is my biggest problem - back in college my
| laptop cooked itself one day because it woke up in my well-
| padded messenger bag and started installing updates. >_<
| sixothree wrote:
| I had so much trouble buying a replacement battery for a server
| raid card. At the time, this was a card they were still
| selling! Oh man. Dell. What a mess.
| blintz wrote:
| Similar experience with the battery and sleep on XPS devices.
| Constantly opening my backpack to discover a literal hot mess.
|
| At this point I'm fed up - what's a better Windows laptop? Not
| interested in touchscreen/tablet modes and I'm willing to pay
| quite a bit. I am leaning towards something from the Surface
| Laptop line, but open to suggestions.
| mattwad wrote:
| I can recommend the Surface line. I think it's a huge
| difference when Microsoft is selling both the hardware and
| software, so you know they are fully compatible. But
| definitely buy "Microsoft Complete." I've swapped my Surface
| Pro 4 out twice no questions asked, both times for some
| screen artifacts which I think came from too much pressure on
| the screen, and the second time they gave me a Pro 5 which
| hasn't had the issue. Their keyboards are exactly the same
| dimensions as Macbook too.
| glinkot wrote:
| After using a macbook with bootcamp for years, I finally
| bought a Surface Book 2 a couple of years back, thinking
| the same thing. Was close to the top of a line, nearly $6k
| AUD. Nice 'not butterfly' keyboard, unified hw/sw
| manufacturer. From the first few days it was problematic -
| had to reinstall from rescue media, and it intermittently
| failed to see the GPU. In between times, normal windows
| updates would create annoying issues - no more screen
| brightness adjustment for example. My least favourite one
| set the volume on any reconnected bluetooth device to 100%,
| thanks guys.
|
| I'll give it to them though, they didn't quibble about
| replacing them. On the third one, the keyboard went dark
| and the top half failed to identify the bottom half (they
| snap apart so the top half is like a giant ipad, for those
| unfamiliar). So dozens of device issues popped up
| constantly. At that point they were ready to give me a
| fourth and I opted for a refund.
|
| So support is good, the idea is fantastic (loved that crazy
| giant ipad!) but the dream of the 'hardware creators making
| sure the OS works perfectly' makes complete sense and has
| been proven by Apple. But MS failed to do it. I still live
| in hope for a future iteration that realises the promise.
|
| PS. I know a few people who have others in the surface line
| which seem reliable, so those are likely to be much better.
| ansible wrote:
| > _The computer would randomly wake up from hibernate and drain
| the battery till it was dead._
|
| I am under the impression that this was a more general Windows
| issue. Does someone else have more information?
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| From my experience, it is the wake timers in some apps that
| abuses it. I recalled it is one of the function that use the
| wake timers. To find this out, open the cmd/PS/WT and type:
|
| powercfg -lastwake
|
| This will tell you which action or hardware initiated the
| wake. It should provide enough clue of the offending
| software. Also the wakes are recorded in the log, you would
| be able to pull up the event viewer to find the lists of the
| offending software that abuses this. There is a event ID for
| it which you can use to track this down, I couldn't remember
| the number.
|
| Edit: Here the guide for finding this in the event viewer.[0]
|
| [0] https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/63136-see-wake-
| source-wi...
| andreyv wrote:
| Perhaps this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
| hardware/design/dev...
|
| > On occasion, the system stays in the active mode (with the
| screen off) for a longer interval of time. These longer
| active intervals occur for a variety of reasons, for example,
| processing incoming email or downloading critical Windows
| updates.
| tomxor wrote:
| I had a couple of similar problem under Linux, but I believe
| these are purely software issues and thus unrelated to the
| windows ones. and also not specific to Dell AFAIK.
|
| 1. Linux kernel "mem-sleep" mode default [0], which
| determines what actually happens when systemd-sleep "suspend"
| is called. The default value is "s2idle" for many distros
| which is as good as leaving your computer running with
| processes paused... when what most users expect is some kind
| of suspend-to-ram ("deep"). Obviously this burns through
| battery pretty quickly but at least it shouldn't overheat.
|
| 2. I found this systemd infinite hybernate loop bug [1] (now
| fixed) when swap is smaller than RAM... although you only
| would come across this is you accidentally under-provisioned
| the swap partition on install like I did - but the failure
| mode was spectacularly bad, because it will retry over and
| over swapping and compressing the RAM which obviously ramps
| up the CPU, get hot with the lid closed, make short work of
| battery and SSD.
|
| Anyway the common issue is #1 which you just have to know
| about otherwise your computer doesn't really suspend at all,
| and since most machines are very quiet these days you won't
| notice unless you dig.
|
| [0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/538541/suspend-
| to-r...
|
| [1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/19550
| uberduper wrote:
| You probably need to investigate s0ix and figure out why
| your machine isn't reaching that state.
| tomxor wrote:
| It is, the problem is you need to explicitly set it.
|
| The default behaviour is unintuitive to most people and
| often they are not even aware it's not doing what they
| expect. This is the problem, not that it doesn't work,
| but that it doesn't work by default.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| It pains me that there's still no comprehensive user docs
| for kernel features. Everything from hybrid graphics to
| power-saving to cpu frequency scaling keeps changing from
| kernel to kernel, and you need a PhD in kernel hacking to
| know how to use any feature of a specific kernel. I've
| searched forums for weeks trying to gleam enough
| information to just get a graphics card to work.
|
| I'm _still_ having an issue where double-finger-touchpad-
| scrolling causes my X server to core dump, and I can 't
| force the X server to actually dump a core file, because I
| can't run `ulimit` before the X server runs. You're kind of
| just shit out of luck as a Linux user.
| viraptor wrote:
| If you're running X session though systemd, as
| LimitCORE=... line to that service's file.
|
| As an extreme option you can always replace the binary
| with a shell script setting ulimit and exec-ing the
| original Xorg.
| ILMostro7 wrote:
| https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/states.txt
|
| At least one of those is mentioned there. But a lot of it
| depends on the implementation by the OEM, ultimately.
| spideymans wrote:
| I had disavowed Dell more than a decade ago due to their
| horrible support, but I figured it was time to give Dell
| another shot at the height of MacBook keyboard gate.
|
| Boy was I wrong. The laptop itself was great when it worked.
| But my XPS 13 shipped with a barely functional trackpad. As
| with you, I had to spend countless hours on the phone with them
| to get them to repair the laptop that was well within its
| warranty. Never again.
| Naracion wrote:
| Companies might also change / evolve / devolve over time--how
| old is your experience?
| 1024core wrote:
| I was contemplating buying a Dell to replace my 10-year old
| MBP, but after reading your comment, I will stay as far away
| from Dell as I can.
|
| Thanks for the warning, friend!
| bradwood wrote:
| 2 words: frame.work
| zapdrive wrote:
| 3 words: do not buy.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| I own two and love them, but I don't expect perfection
| either.
|
| I've owned ibm, lenovo, clevo, dell, apple, and all of
| them were okay.
|
| At least the framework people are going in the right
| direction.
| krasin wrote:
| I really wish it was true. Same issues with sleep on
| framework, see this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166802
| baskint wrote:
| i own one and running Ubuntu on it and I confirm that it
| will drain the battery if left on sleep. Mine is always
| on charge and I make sure to shutdown before traveling.
| Otherwise, it is a decent machine for lagging around
| gcthomas wrote:
| My XPS13 with pre-installed Ubuntu sleeps fine without
| any battery-running-down issue. Is this a Windows issue?
| Freaken wrote:
| https://luisartola.com/solving-the-framework-laptop-
| battery-...
| gorjusborg wrote:
| You will find a person complaining about every laptop, the
| internet is a big place.
|
| I've been very happy with my dell xps 13 developer edition.
| Had it for years running windows and linux dual boot with
| zero problems.
| NeutronStar wrote:
| hadlock wrote:
| The wake from sleep issue only started in 2017 and going
| forward, might be why you are not having issues.
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| I've had mostly good experiences with dell's XPS 13 laptops.
| Coil whine has been a problem.
|
| Dell is the only company I know of that really stands behind
| their products. The default(at least here) warranty includes
| next business day on-site repair.
|
| The times I've had issues during the last 15+ years Dell has
| sent someone to fix it, fast. Nobody else seems to be willing
| to do that if their product fails. Must be really expensive
| for Dell when something goes wrong.
|
| They do however stop producing/selling batteries much earlier
| than they should...
| mfkp wrote:
| Lenovo took care of my Thinkpad T14s AMD when the keyboard
| started acting funky. Ordered the parts and sent a tech to
| my house to install it within a week. So I would still
| recommend getting a nice Thinkpad.
| entropie wrote:
| > Coil whine has been a problem.
|
| Iam pretty sure its only with linux on my xps 13. Any fix?
| I hate it.
| _pigpen__ wrote:
| I worked for EMC through the acquisition by Dell. I spoke
| with a someone in Dell MFG about their test process. In
| short, they test as configured by the customer. We were
| discussing a blade server. I asked what happens if a
| customer buys an additional blade and that slot on the
| backplane doesn't work, because it wasn't tested? The
| answer: we get them a new backplane really quickly. Dell is
| all about removing cost from the business and that means
| they made the calculation that it's cheaper to test as
| configured and pay for the few cases where someone upgrades
| and has an issue, versus test everyone's machine
| comprehensively. Needless to say, this wasn't the EMC way.
| So yes, it's expensive to overnight a new part to
| customers, but someone has done the ROI and figured out
| that is cheaper than testing every system for every
| anticipated problem.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I'm glad that when I got a Dell XPS I noticed the problems
| extremely quickly so I could return it. It had a horrendously
| whiny fan that seemed to always be running. Battery life was
| unimpressive. And there was a trackpad issue where picking
| the machine up from a corner would cause it to click
| (apparently this is an issue that's been there for a few
| generations).
|
| Unless you need x86, just go with an M1 Mac. They're
| ridiculously power efficient without sacrificing performance.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I bought a new Dell a couple of years ago and just after
| getting it I was sitting beside my wife on the couch. Her
| macbook had 2 out of 3 wifi bars while my dell had trouble
| connecting at all. Thankfully they accepted the return and
| issued a refund without much hassle. I got a Lenovo ThinkPad
| (T-Series) and it's been rock solid.
| cgriswald wrote:
| I switched to Dell because my Apple MBP was dead-dead and
| their existing line at the time was garbage according to
| everyone I knew who got one.
|
| I had the same problem as you with my new Dell. On my own I
| replaced the Wi-Fi card with an Intel one and it fixed the
| problems. That said, I had the same battery issues, etc. as
| the original poster. I don't hate my XPS, but I would not
| buy again.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > They swapped many models to a shitty wifi card that caused
| bsod.
|
| I assume you mean the Killer card. If you bug their support
| about this, they'll often agree to replace yours with an Intel
| one.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The secret to Dell is you need to buy "ProSupport". It costs
| like $100 more.
|
| I had an issue that was known with certain Dell universal
| docking stations. We had the elevated support and got a hot fix
| in a few days. A colleague with the same laptop, same dock has
| the same problem and got nothing - they refused to acknowledge
| or support the dock connection, claiming that they only support
| "hardware" and not windows drivers. Eventually the driver was
| released a few months later.
|
| Other OEMs like Lenovo and HP don't fuck around with stuff like
| this. Just price Dell like for like with the equivalent support
| offering. Dell's pricing is usually very competitive, so you'll
| probably find they will still win some comparisons, and when
| they do the "pro" offering is better.
| getcrunk wrote:
| > The secret to Dell is you need to buy "ProSupport". It
| costs like $100 more.
|
| I had the prosupport, still got Indian call center.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I've received plenty of decent support from what seem to be
| Indian call centers. ("seem" because I could be wrong about
| accents). I've had awful support from other call centers. I
| have also been involved in multiple call center
| procurements: The question is more about the training of
| call center staff that you're willing to pay for, not
| location. Dell could get high quality call centers in India
| if they were willing to put resources into building an
| excellent knowledge based and extensive training for call
| center staff. Dell has chosen not to go that route.
| getcrunk wrote:
| Yea of course, my implication was that it wasn't US
| support, which could have more maneuverability and
| decision making as opposed to a rigid script. But you are
| right in that it's actually about the company and
| training/policies.
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| Yup. Prosupport was very worth it.. People who buy Macs for
| work also buy Apple Care, right? Same thing. Dell sent
| technicians to my house twice to fix issues. My only gripe
| was that my Precision didn't seem to fully support the Ubuntu
| 18.04 it came with, but everything has been better with
| 20.04.
| Datenstrom wrote:
| Switched to System76 after I was given one at an old workplace
| and loved it, never had any problems with Linux on one. Had to
| deal with their support too once after I spilled beer on the
| keyboard during a late night hacking session. It was easy, low
| friction, talked to a real human, quick, and they even offered
| to replace it for free but I paid for it anyway.
| fruit2020 wrote:
| Isn't this a known issue that it can't hibernate properly?
| ILMostro7 wrote:
| AFAIK, the issue with hibernation, partly at least, is because
| they don't provide an alternative sleep method via firmware.
| Only the default method is available; e.g. S2idle on Linux.
|
| I was about to link to a discussion about that, but that seems
| to be gone as well.
|
| The relevant kernel docs here:
| https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/states.txt
| rob_c wrote:
| Yep, have to agree completely.
|
| Support around the XPS is lacking when there is a hardware
| defect. I've even pointed out one with the bios which Dell
| wouldn't acknowledge or fix as my 9360 was way out of warranty
| by the time I'd identified it. (Random lockups on wake caused
| by bad i2c behaviour from trackpad, fix disable i2c and
| "fallback" to spi)...
|
| Ended up with 3 motherboards though as my employer has a good
| warranty agreement. Shame they all suffered from coil whine and
| the 2nd engineer sliced a cable with a screwdriver. I genuinely
| could have done better myself, ended up fixing the coil wine
| with non conductive hot snott..
|
| Great work Dell...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > The computer would randomly wake up from hibernate and drain
| the battery till it was dead.
|
| I had this happen, but it was the cat that would nap on the
| keyboard until the laptop died and stopped being warm.
| the-dude wrote:
| This is either hilarious or you're working for Dell ( I love
| cats ).
| Scoundreller wrote:
| It wasn't a Dell, no.
| hadlock wrote:
| The wake from sleep issue on the XPS 15 is what killed Dell for
| me as a brand. I do not have this problem with any other brand.
| I chat with a lot of Dell XPS 15 owners and they all report the
| same issue.
| whylo wrote:
| > The computer would randomly wake up from hibernate and drain
| the battery till it was dead.
|
| I had exactly the same thing on my XPS 15. I'd take it out of
| my bag, it'd be warm and the battery would be dead. Plus one
| day it suddenly decided it didn't have a TPM module (didn't
| even show up in BIOS) so BitLocker stopped working, and of late
| the CPU is constantly throtling and fans running at full blast
| because it's overheating even with next to no load (I've
| checked the fans for dust).
| jtwigg wrote:
| I had similar issues with dell support and my XPS 13 a while
| ago. Absolutely no way that I'll be buying another dell.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yep. 3 generations of dell for me, every time a different
| problem. I miss my samsung ativ book.
|
| Next one will be a framework laptop.
| halz wrote:
| As thermal budgets get pushed with more power in smaller
| packages, replacing the OEM thermal paste/pad is almost becoming
| a standard operation. Recent AMD/Nvidia GPUs have experienced
| thermal throttling issues due to poor or outright missing
| application of the thermal interface material on RAM and GPU
| components.
|
| At some point after warranty expiration, as a "hail mary", I
| replaced the OEM thermal paste in my Precision laptop and saw
| peak temperatures plummet around 20C, where it was previously
| bouncing off the CPU thermal throttle limits with the fans on
| max.
| digisign wrote:
| > I replaced the OEM thermal paste
|
| Have a good tutorial for that?
| sangeeth96 wrote:
| Going to add myself to the list of people Dell managed to
| successfully piss off. Bought a top-of-the-line XPS 15 2018 model
| and once the initial "wow" factor of owning a premium laptop
| faded away, I was bombarded with numerous issues such as:
|
| * Lack of S3 sleep state leading to battery drains and heating up
| while inside my bag; modern standby was trash back then * Piss-
| poor thermals leading to piss-poor performance with an Intel i9
| processor * Horrible support service with copy-paste answers and
| ZERO resolutions even though I had their premium support; a lot
| of solutions are community initiatives * Horrendous trackpad
|
| I've since monitored future XPS releases and found it got even
| worse. For example, there was a common trackpad double-clicking
| issue that plagued the later models. The thing that really pisses
| me off is tech reviewers not calling out Dell even though they
| faced these issues with their review/retail units. This applies
| even for Alienware--where's the outrage on the m51 scam?[1] The
| times they complain, they aren't loud enough and Dell just gets
| away with it.
|
| I've told my friends and family to avoid buying Dell for the
| foreseeable future. I'd advise the folks here to do the same
| unless your company is expensing it.
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/7/22522265/dell-alienware-
| ar...
| jabiko wrote:
| I don't think it has something to do with the post here.
|
| For me it seems like everything except the "Work from Home" forum
| has disappeared. So its probably just some forum issues.
| donio wrote:
| Please let us have our moment of self-importance.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-02-14 23:02 UTC)