Dell XPS 15 R2 - L502x - Owners Lounge

Thanks Senor Massao. I've fortunately found the cause of it being a conflict between windows update KB 3161608/3172605 and my wireless 1030 N Bluetooth. Intel's just after releasing a driver fix for a lot of their Windows 7 adapters and are promising to add more adapters to it. Here's hoping it includes this one.

In the meantime I just uninstalled and hidden the update. It's not an important one anyway.

Just as regards Clean Installs - has anyone installed the Intel HD 3000 graphics driver as opposed to the OEM one which is significantly out of date? I've read that Intel had significantly improved the performance of these graphics in the later drivers. I don't know however if they'd be compatible with the whole dual graphics thing on these laptops.

 

I tried it once a year ago through Intel Update software Utiility....didnt work (did not successfully install).I just gave up after few tries, thinking that "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" If you want to, I think it is better to uninstall the HP driver, and than download the latest driver from Intel and manually install.

 

Hi there! New in the forum and just replace the 500GB HD to a 240GB SSD and would like to know if changing SATA mode from IDE to AHCI would be fine or if there´s something else to be done like upgrading any kind of intel software.

Thanks!

 

I tried to install the new drivers on mine but for some reason the latest downloaded drivers doesn't recognise the Intel HD 3000. So I just went with the OEM. But to tell you the truth, I don't think there is actually any massive change in these latest updates. The OEM is quite stable and we tend to use the Nvidia card whenever we do any real graphic intensive stuff anyways.

 

Anyone here with the hard freeze issue? My xps just freezes completely with a very jarring looping sound. I've been keeping up with this for 3 years now. Does it even have a fix?! I mean, I even underclocked the GPU. Flashed the low voltage BIOS. No solution. Nothing. Nothing at all. Still freezes anytime I start any graphic intensive games. Funnily enough, the only game that didn't actually freeze on me was Witcher 2 (and 1 for that matter). CoD, Skyrim, Shadow of Mordor, etc all freezed this notebook to death.

 

Sorry for a late reply, but it is the XPS's bad design at fault. The thing is sturdy and awesome as hell, but the cooling system is a bit funny. The hard drive is near the CPU/GPU, but the ventilation only reacts to the GPU/GPU being under load or hot. The HDD takes up a lot of the heat that should be moved to the radiator to be vent-cooled, so under a load the HDD is actually the one that overheats. It is a weird problem, but can be observed with temperature monitoring while playing something GPU-intensive. It is also why the left wrist rest gets hot.

My solution was underclocking the GPU (540M GT). A small (-100MHz) underclock is not enough. The original clocks I believe were Core 672MHz, Memory 900MHz, I set them to 532/730 (by experimentation - if I still got the stutter-freeze, I rebooted and underclocked some more). Now I have had the stutterfreeze, but instead of every time I play something hot, it happens once or twice a year. To be noted, it means it is pretty much at the 530M GS level or worse, which is a pretty significant drop. I use MSI Afterburner for it, loads on startup.

 

Well... after more than 6 years of faithful and hard service my L502x has died in the line of duty. It will be missed. Just ordered an XPS15-9560 to replace her so I hope it is at least half as reliable and useful as the L502x was.

 

L502X requires BIOS update for side channel attacks, unfortunately not new bios release is planned http://www.dell.com/support/article...e-2017-5754---impact-on-dell-products?lang=en.
Has anyone managed to contact DELL to ask if there any plans to release a BIOS update for the L502x?

 

I think this laptop is no longer supported at all, no driver updates neither Dell gives a s*** about this laptop. All I can say is that I use Win10 on this laptop and works pretty nice with it (maybe better than when I had Win7), my battery will be replaced soon and my RAM will be upgraded from 8GB to 16 GB soon. Only part so far that died was my charger, so I had to buy one on 2015. Was thinking on replacing it for one of the newer models but after I heard all of the spectre and meltdown scandal I decided to wait a little.