Precision 7560 & 7760 Owners' Thread

Could anyone provide some guidance on how to copy the SSD that comes with the laptop onto another drive? I tried using Macrium Reflect to clone the drive, which seemed to work - but changing the boot order in the BIOS to remove the inbuilt drive does not seem to work and whatever I do it continues to boot with that drive. In disk management I get an error "Disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online).

 

I do have a 2nd question as well, is there a way to tell inside Windows which drive is using the PCI-4 slot (my understanding is this is the drive on its own) as opposed to the PCI-3 slots. I've got identical drives in both, and want to install the OS on the PCI-4 but don't know which one is which and would rather not open everything up again to remove one.

 

It's a bit strange with UEFI. My suggestion: immediately after the clone, DISABLE your old drive in the BIOS, and then the system should boot from the new drive. That should "stick" when you go back and re-enable the new drive. (But to be extra sure, boot a separate tool and wipe the old drive after successfully booting the new one.)

CrystalDiskInfo should be able to show this.

 

@Aaron441 thanks - that is a good idea; although now I get a Bitlocker error wanting a key even though I thought Macrium reflect disabled bitlocker on drive copy. Do you know what I might be doing wrong there?

 

Macrium Reflect does not disable BitLocker. I cloned my drive with it just a few weeks ago and it was preserved (I was surprised at that, but didn't really mind). Just put in the key, and then suspend/resume BitLocker from the control panel after booting (to avoid having to re-enter the key at every boot). There might be a way to get Macrium Reflect to disable BitLocker for the transfer. If you did not put in your BitLocker key before starting the transfer then there is no way that it could decrypt the drive.

If you cloned to a larger drive you might need to check Disk Management and see if it actually extended your partition size to fill the space. In my case, it did not. You can extend a partition on the fly from Disk Management. If there is another partition "in the way" at the end of the drive that prevents you from extending your system partition, you'll have to move it to the end of the drive with a tool like GParted.

 

I'm fond of Clonezilla, a free tool that's been around for a long time. Functionally Clonezilla is similar to Acronis True Image. Clonezilla boots and runs under Debian Linux, which explains why it supports a few file systems not supported by commercial cloning tools, e.g., btrfs. I dual boot my laptops so I find support for Linux file system formats quite useful.

I normally use a Clonezilla Live image to create a bootable USB drive, then boot into Clonezilla. Among other things, Clonezilla Live lets me clone a new system's drive before booting it for the first time.

I most recently used Clonezilla to image the Windows partition delivered on the 256GB SSD drive that came in my 7560. I then wrote that image to the 2TB SanDisk SSD I now use as my boot drive. Because I prefer a small C: drive with users' files stored on D:, I did not extend the original C: partition into the unused space on the new drive. This partitioning scheme also allows me to mount D: as /data when running under Linux without mounting the Windows boot drive.

 

A while ago I posted about subpar battery life on a Precision 7560 with switchable graphics enabled. Before, I was getting around 2.5-3 hours of battery life idling with minimum screen brightness. The other day, I was messing around in the Dell Power Manager and changed from the "Cool" setting to "Ultra Performance." Now, I am getting 7-9 hours of battery life while doing various tasks. Is it possible there could be some bug in the Dell Power Manager preventing it from putting the dGPU to sleep? I haven't changed anything other than that setting. Also, when comparing the HWiNFO total system power usage, before at idle it averaged 30-35 watts. Now, while idling, it averages 5-6 watts.

 

Last weekend, I tried Skype and my interlocutor was complaining about my microphone stuttering. I uninstalled the last Realtek audio driver, rebooted, and the problem was gone. Does anybody have the same issue? (whether it is through Skype, Zoom, or any other software using the microphone)

 

My 3.5mm microphone never worked to begin with on the 7760, even after installing all of the audio-related drivers. Yet this same earphone/microphone worked just fine on my old 7740.
In the end, I bought a USBC earphone/microphone on Ebay, and that works perfectly.

 

I have a coworker who did video chat with us using a Precision 7560 and the built-in mic. We haven't had a stuttering issue, but the sound coming back from him was way too quiet (even after all levels are set to max on his side). Got him to switch to a headset after a few days.

I tried the 3.5mm jack yesterday and couldn't get it to work either. It didn't even output sound to the headphones part of my headset; it just kept coming out of the system speakers. I hate the Realtek audio chip/drivers :-\
It was a pain to get it working as a headset on my Precision 7530. Had to pop up a separate piece of Realtek software and configure the jack as a headset jack (every time something was plugged in). I also use a USB-C adapter to avoid the headache. You can get the Apple one for like $9. It has pretty great performance for the price.