--->The Official Studio XPS 1340 Owner's Thread<--- *Part 2*

Yeah I had a feeling they were having some delays which is why I opted for the outlet but I am having enough troubles there as well

 

I am from New Zealand and ordered on the 17th of October. It was "shipped from the factory" on the 24th of October and the online order status hasn't changed since. Delivery date went from 2 November to 6 November and now its looking like next week.

When I ring Customer Care they keep telling me "It's left the factory and has just arrived in the country". I've called every day since the 2nd of November and get the exact same response.

I have never had an order take so long. Usually if you order on Wednesday it would arrive next Wednesday. Never longer than 7 days.

 

I went through the EPP site and the configuration came out to ~$120 more on the website than what i have shown. The EPP did not give me a configuration for adding bluetooth though.

I called, and inquired about adding bluetooth, which they were able to do through the phone for an additional $20 i think. I then had asked if they had any other discount offers available. They gave me an option for a "student" discount (i had mentioned that i was in college) that gave me it roughly $70 cheaper, but it came with a printer. I then told the person over the phone that I had no use for a printer, and if there was any way that they could give me an additional discount if they removed the printer. She asked her manager, and gave me an additional $50 off without a printer .

 

I received my free win 7 upgrade cds. It comes with 2 cds. In instructions it says use windows 7 assist cd first and then install the win 7 OS... Do I really need to do this step? Or can I just install the os cd and thats all?

What Im trying to do is a clean os install, will I lose something important if I skip the assist cd?

Thank you in advance.

 

I should receive my SXPS 13 later today - but just wanted to let you guys know that I have found some benchmarks on the G210M: Benchmark on G210M

 

5231 3dmarks is really impressive. That is more than what I use to get on my old HP - DV5-1132tx with its 9600 GT card. Thats 2600 3dmarks more than the 9500M.

 

5231 is indeed a big improvement over the previous score of 3000+ with the 9500M GE. Now, if they can post some more gaming fps'....

 

It's about time. Too bad, I'm probably going to get rid of my 1340 and buy a 1645...

 

Wow, it is very nice to have that nice score. It even beats my friend's 9650m GT GPU. Does he reach 5231 after he OCed? I really want to know the overclock setting.

 

I'm also curious how it handles cooling...

 

any one tried hackintosh with this computer with any success

 

Those benchmarks are interesting. It says it give a significant boost to games. I don't know how the Crysis benchmarking tool counts as a game.

 

Guys I need your help!!! I installed win7, and installed the all win7 drivers from dell.com ... now my videos are must worse in quality( the same videos that use to work great in vista!) I have 9400M G card. I've also tried the nvidia drivers, same thing, so I reverted back to official dell drivers... did anyone else have this problem?

Its soo wierd!! I backed up my videos, and after the the clean install of win7 the same videos are smudgly!

Please help!

 

From the picture of that website, 210m and 9500m GE use the same heat sink....interesting.

 

Hello guys. I'm from Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar

I bought a Dell XPS 1340 refurbished 1 months ago, from eBay's top seller. My laptop came with Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit, and then I downloaded Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit SE and reformat my laptop then installed Windows 7. (Cracked Windows 7 , not genuine) My laptop freezes often. I've updated all drivers, including BIOS, but my laptop still hangs when working on it. Please help me to fix the freezing problem. I've tried drivers from NVIDIA. but the result is zero. I have too many problem with my laptop sometimes freezes while reading BIOS and media button stops working.


sorry for my english :

there is my laptop main spec:
CPU: C2D T8600 2.4GHz
RAM: 4GB DDR3 1067MHz Dual Channel
VGA: nVidia 9400M
HDD: WD Scorpio Blue 160gb

 

Does the Dell Diagnostic Utilitly (64-bit) come on the 1340? I should be receiving my 1340 next week and want to completely check it out during the return period. Thanks to all of your posts, things I now know to look for include:

1) Updated Bios/Drivers
2) Wireless functionality
3) ESata port works properly
4) Performance after hibernate/sleep of the DVD, Wireless, Bluetooth, HDMI out, etc.
5) What else am I missing????

 

Dell.com/support>select your laptop(1340)>Dell Diagnostic utility

 

What program are you using to watch videos? I had this problem using VLC player when I first updated to Windows 7. They released and update that fixed my issues. Also, might try doing a clean uninstall of the drivers your using and try nvidia's.

 

I just checked my order status online again. It said "In Production". Then I called in to check on the order status and the recording said my product shipped today!

Can't wait. I've been using my OLD Inspiron 2200 and it is killing me. Although, I gotta say that old laptop just keeps on ticking while my more recent purchases have had a much shorter life.

 

Yes its worse in vlc but that is fixed by switching vlc to openGL( but still worse than on vista, very grainny!)

and windows media player works better than vlc(before doing changes to it)
but still I have 700p vidoes, and 1080p videos that show like they are 400p.. very very smudgy... I did clean install and uninstalled the dell video driver and installed the nvidia driver same thing..

I googled the problem "windows bad quality video" and a lot of people have this problem, who also have latest drivers, and all kinds of video cards, even gaming video cards! They all report after switching from vista or xp to win7 their old videos play in horrible quality! Yet windows havent addressed this problem yet..

Some how I dont see anything better about win7 other than prettier looks slitly faster boot time, but very bad video performace, maybe due to direct x 10??

snow leopard wont the competition for no problems and no worries, bill gates let me down again

 

Did you try installing the new VLC player V1.03? That's what fixed it for me. My guess is the codecs with previous versions jacked up the codecs used by WMP, etc.

 

did it fix it for you completely? like make it cristal clear or just better than pixelated quality? and if I understand correctly after you download 1.003 it fixed the problem even if you play a video in wmp??

Thanx for taking your time on helping me out

 

Yep, all my videos look great or as good as a SD video can. I have an HD video on one of my external drives and it looks crystal clear.

 

I just installed the latest 370 bluetooth drivers, works great

 

Does anyone know if the xps 1330 and 1340 batteries are interchangeable?

Thanks.

 

Thanks a lot man! I installed the latest vlc player and it works ok I guess, either way much better, all tho im still pretty sure its not as sharp, but I've done a test in which I downloaded 720p videos from youtube and they were just amazing in vlc. I hope overall win7 will fix this problem forever.

Again thank you!

 

Just received my XPS 1340 with the G210M card.

I also have an XPS 1340 with the 9500M and I just swapped hard drives and it was a mission trying to uninstall the drivers. Seems like most of the good drivers (185.68) do not work with this card as it does not detect the 210M.

My 3dmarks was 4822 without any alterations. I reckon if I could somehow install 185.68 I would get over 5000 3dmarks. Just playing the usual games Wolfenstein, Crysis, Fifa 10 I can notice (apart from the obvious performance increase) that there is absolutely no stuttering or tearing that I had with the 9500. Looks like no sync problems so far. Laptop is much cooler than with the 9500 as well.

Also the cards seem to be still using system memory. I would have thought with the dedicated 512mbs on the G210M and the 128mbs on the 9400G that it would free up ram. But I seem to be losing 1.6GB of ram to the video cards.

 

I won't bore you with all the problems I've had with this laptop. Suffice it to say I've had the majority of hardware replaced. But...

I dealt with the major issues before the A11 BIOS with all that DPC latency, and got it down pretty well. Now, post-windows 7 update, the dreaded giant red spikes every minute or so are back, as well as latency just below 2000 us very 15 seconds or so. At least it isn't garbling audio and video for a few seconds twice a minute, like it used to do, but its still noticable. Any ideas?

The hard drive replacement I have, while not making scratching noises, runs pretty loudly. It's high pitched, and is really grating to work on without headphones, and draws the occasional look in a quiet classroom. Does anyone know if there is/how to access any acoustic mode in the BIOS? Or anything else I could do to minimize noise?

My config is:

SXPS 1340:
Windows 7 64-bit
Intel Core 2 Duo P8700
A11 BIOS
6GB RAM
500GB SATA drive
GeForce 9500M

 

^^^ Not to laugh at you, but I can see the embarrasment of being in a quiet classroom and xps1340 making a bunch of weird noise. All I can say this is my first dell, I have it for half a year and I will never buy another dell! Too much stress goes into fixing the laptop than using it.
Good luck

 

I have the 500GB 7200RPM drive, and it doesn't make any noticeable noise. My Zalman notebook cooler is much louder than the fans and HDD put together even when it's on low.

 

Moshnz, can you download the hardware monitor to check the temperature? one at idle, and one at hrs or minutes after the game play.

 

Hello Everyone,

I've been an avid reader of this post for a few months now. Just wondering whether anyone has any specs on the new Dell 1520 wireless n card and how it compares to the 1510?

 

My system exchange had that 1520 wifi card but it was canceled due to its unavability

 

62 degrees at idle, 71 after 2 hours of playing NFS Shift.

 

that temperature was taken with out the notebook cooler right? If it is then the new graphic card is cooler. Mine idle temperature is 66 C and after 1 hour of playing, it will get to 85 C

 

Just wanna check if you have 64 or 32 bits windows (was thinking the loss of memory there).
I so want dell to replace my 9500 with the new one : /

 

It is impossible to do that. I already asked more than 5 dell reps, and got the same response " i am afraid that it is not possible." Maybe some how you can convince them to sell you the motherboard

 

That's quite an improvement. Mine usually hits 92 degrees when gaming.

 

^^^^ when stressed the 71C is fine, but at idle 62c thats pretty high.. I get 38-40c at idle, thats only on 9400mg but still idling I dont see why 210m should be around 62c

 

Idle at 62C is normal because two GPUs use one heatsink in the 210m but the 9400m has its own heatsink. It is considered pretty normal for hybrid SLI users.

 

When I turn SLI mode off, then the 210M card is disabled and only the 9400G card is running. Usually this card alone in non-sli mode idles at 50 degrees.

When I had the 9500 card, both cards would Idle at around 60 degrees. Only after the copper mod did I manage to get it down to ~55.

Also I have noticed that while gaming in SLI the fan comes on earlier compared to the 9500 where it would turn on after say 10 minutes of gaming.

 

well duno about that mine is copper modded 9400m idles 38-40

 

Any new SXPS 1340 owners experiencing the ethernet problem; when the system resume from standby/sleep, the ethernet does not work. Only way to fix is reboot...Does anyone know how to fix this? Got latest drivers, turned off option to "turn this device off to save power"..but no luck.

Using Windows 7 X64(Thanks Dell for the upgrade)

 

Thinking of getting this laptop! Just a few questions needed answered from the owners.

What kind of battery life are you guys getting with the 6 cell battery? Integrated graphics on? Integrated graphics off?
What kind of battery life are you guys getting with the 9 cell battery?
Integrated graphics on? Integrated graphics off?

(Please also list your hardware and what programs you are running, etc.)

 

I recently got close to 4 hours with 2nd to lowest brightness, power-save mode, browsing, little bit of youtube.

Using 210m SLI(9400m in power saver mode)
6-Cell battery
P8700
WLED

 

I will start a test right now and see how it goes. I usually got no more than 2 and a half hours with the 9500M in power save mode.

 

How will the two system different in terms of the battery life if they all use 9400m in power saving mode? I think he meant the battery life in performance mode?

 

Mine just got to the critical battery level of 5% with 8 mins remaining, so thats a total of 2 hours and 43 minutes in power saving mode with browsing.

 

Moshnz,
How low was your brightness? I had mine on 2nd to lowest brightness on WLED screen. Got around 3 hours 50 minutes before getting the system turned off. Was doing an essay for class, browsing, maybe an hour of youtube/hulu in between.

Using a 5400 RPM drive by the way(original 7200 RPM was noisy so waiting for dell to send a NEW, not refurbished replacement drive), wifi off(used ethernet), bluetooth off. Power saver mode.

Still trying to fix the ethernet problem where it does not work when the system resumes form sleep/standby.

 

Brightness was at 2 after I read your post. I was on skype audio call for an hour but I doubt that would suck an hour of battery life? Apart from that and the fact that my hard drive is 7200rpm there is no difference between my system and yours. I do not know why my battery life was so low. I even manually edited my power saving settings and set maximum processor to 20% on battery. Still didnt help.