**The Official Studio XPS 1645 Intel Core i7 "Owners Lounge" - Part 2

Nice!

Was it hard to do? My previous experience is limited to one application of thermal paste 10 years ago

 

It wasn't hard. I took my time & followed this video guide: http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...ging-thermal-paste-as5-studio-xps-1645-a.html Best thing I ever did for my computer!

 

My display driver crashed few times and vertical strips came all
Over. Even in bios menu there is strips. It goes away when I mouse hover. I formatted and made a clean win 7 installation but I'm
Getting BSOD and can't get past loading screen. Does anyone know how to fix it? How to reset bios? Here it how it looks : http://i.imgur.com/iFpUYXH.jpg

 

That sounds like a broken GPU to me
I had the exact same symptoms on an older Dell laptop, and in that case the moterboard (with attached GPU) had to be replaced.

 

I got a bad flash with my dell 1647. Could anyone help me to recover its bios ? I tried some instruction for 1645 and 1640 but it does not work with my 1647. I am unable to access the recovery mode, there is no led on the usb flash.

 

Your video chip has failed probably due to overheating. If you are in the US there's a guy advertising repair, on eBay, of the 1645 motherboard for $100US. He's based in Florida. If you feel competent enough to strip your computer down and put it back together, this is the way to go.

When reassembling make sure you clean out the heatsink and fan and reapply heat conductive paste to the GPU and CPU. Make sure you don't damage any of the silicone heat conductive pads on the northbridge chip and ram around the GPU unless you source some new silicone heat pads on eBay. There's a guy in Hong Kong on eBay selling a big sheet of 1mm stuff for about $20. You might consider replacing the pad on the northbridge with a copper ship of suitable thickness. There's a guy in China selling 30 shims in 6 thickness sizes for about $10 - again on eBay.

The best heat conductive compound is MX2 (or similiar name) which is reputed to be better than arctic silver and is not electrically conductive as arctic silver is.

 

Have a look at the forum MYDELLMINI.COM. There are instructions there how to recover a bad flash on the Dell Mini 1012. It may just work on the SXPS1647.

 

Try cleaning the fan and heatsink. The heatsink fins accumulate gunk which affects its performance. You could also try applying new heat conductive compound on the GPU and CPU.

 

I have had four different Studio XPS 16 models over the years that I sold or gave to family. I recently got my 4th since it was $200 on eBay and I wanted to refurbish one and enjoy the RGB LED again - an unparalleled screen and play some Star Craft II and watch 1080p videos.

1. A Phillips screwdriver is all you really need to completely disassemble, clean, replace, and upgrade this model.
2. Replacement parts are cheap and plentiful, although the RGB-LED screens are finally disappearing.
3. Adding a good SSD really makes these snappy, at least with the I7-820QM I have.
4. It is tempting to spring for one of the extreme processors on eBay and see how it performs now that they are 5 years old and much cheaper to buy

I had some issues with running fans at first but I cleaned everything out, got a Logitech N200 cooler, took off the sticker vent covers underneath and now I get up in the 70s on gaming after an hour or two but it still feels just warm to the touch on the keyboard deck. On idle high 40s, on websurfing 50s and sometimes 60.

A few tips if you buy a used one and refurbish it.
1. Use Throttle Stop
2. Download Bios 13.5, the unofficial one
3. Use MSI Afterburner, I increased my 4670 to 850 core 900 memory - zero artifacts
4. On the Dell 370 bluetooth turn off going to sleep to save power - it would not connect to anything otherwise
5. The keyboard deck new goes for about $25, backlit keyboard $25, the bottom about $10, the chassis about $10, new battery - $25, Dell 370 bluetooth module $6, screen $50-75 depending, but an RGB LED can be had for about $80.
6. I found the Intel 5300 to work great, I get 75-80 mbs in my basement on a 150/150 plan Verizon Fios so I wouldn't upgrade it

Weird problems
1. I got the RGB LED Screen New and replace the LED screen that came with, KEEP THE clear plastic sheath sticker on the hinge (almost invisible), I didn't and mine got scratched on the small silver painted part where the hinge connects when I let the keyboard rest rub up against it while upgrading.
2. I got frozen windows 4 times on various installs after installing SP1 and had to redo it, annoying, turns out my Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX dongle was slightly off
3. I did the 13.9 legacy ATI drivers but it installs as FirePro actually wish it was the consumer version to tweak video watching
4. I took out the CD Rom drive and put the old hard drive in that spot and put an SSD in the Primary.
6. Get a used keyboard if you want to replace a shiny key well used one, I found that the NEW ones are actually just painted a black matte paint that chips off, avoid those.
7. A cloth diaper and the Pledge Electronics dust stuff does a good job cleaning up finger prints and putting on slightly glidey feel to the whole item similar to how it feels after you dust a table.
8. Obviously air-can the heck out of the fan and the inside of the laptop.

Results
1. StarCraft II very good frame rates no throttling, beautiful visuals, I set it to 1080p medium, except textures to ultra and movies to high
2. 1080p video looks fantastic
3. The fan noise is mostly gone after throttle stop, 13.5 bios, and removing the useless stickers over the vent covers that impede airflow
4. I created several system restore save points as I was upgrading drivers and once I was all done just saved the one
5. A neat trick, if you can download or get get the Dell Windows 7 Ultimate Disc it will install and activate this laptop without a product key and I am already signed up for the Free Windows 10 upgrade.

Loving the screen, that is the reason for going through all the troubles with this laptop. It looks amazing. AMOLED-Like with everything from web-surfing to videos and games. Funny, my screen seemed almost calibrated, I used to use the two Dell color ICC profiles, this one doesn't need it. Red is still fiery but the white is perfect and all looks good so I left it alone.

 

Good stuff timoric. I agree with you, the RGB-LED screen on this thing was one-of-a-kind. It would easily rival and top many screens today. As you see in my signature, I had my now-ancient M1530 replaced by Dell for one of these in 2010. It lasted me 5 years until it died a few months ago. Great system that would have been excellent if the engineers from Dell didn't design the bottom lip of the screen to half-block the back exhaust vent on this thing when open. So, so foolish. With that design flaw, heat was its main problem, which led to GPU throttling that ThrottleStop (who is the MAN!) mostly fixed. If you don't have the 130W adapter Dell reluctantly pushed out to help alleviate that issue, try to get one.

Mine was plugging along very nicely until I tried to resume it from sleep and the screen showed me some funny green/red line streaks and gave out. Turning it on, screen's been black ever since and it really won't even boot. As an EOL, I tried everything to diagnose and fix myself. I came to the conclusion that it was the GFX card that had given out due to heat exhaustion. The screen still seem to back-light itself up, but remained black. I took the whole thing apart, reseated the screen cables, cleaned out fans/heatsink and reapplied paste....but that didn't help. Plugged it in on HDMI, and got nothing which makes it very likely that the GFX gave out. Even the BIOS error beep codes suggested an unfixable display card issue. EOL so no recourse (not even Best Buy repair)...had to move on.

However like you said with an SSD and as up-to-date a driver state as you can load on this thing it still runs well for most non-gaming basic/media tasks + for games of that time 2009-2012-ish. Those first-gen Quad-core CPUs are still very decent. I was doing what I needed and had been playing the crap out of L4D2 (Dirt 3, COD Black Ops, etc) on it before it flagged out on me. Essentially, as with all laptop's this thing is a ticking time bomb, but especially with that stupid vent design at the back. Even heat was an issue; those temps were what I was getting too. It always felt warm the touch, my hands just got used to the radiator effect . Max temps on load ~85 . The leather accent on the bottom lip of the lid on my model, probably didn't help either but it looked frickin' cool. Beautiful laptop. A cooler is a great idea, almost a must for this system (like you're using)! I never removed the sticker vent covers on the bottom of mine, because personally I found that they caught a LOT of dust. Without them, temps might have been lower but the higher dust accumulation might have just balanced that out. Constant air compression/cleaning out would have been even more needed.

In fact, since I took care of this thing and it's essentially paperweight now I should think of selling off some parts. I don't have any eBay presence so I'd probably have to do all that. Still have my 130W that I can even get rid of. Keyboard looks good. Like I said, I don't think it was the screen that had the problem, so I could probably sell that even...but we'll see .

As for some advise for the already good refurb job you've done:

1. I have a backlog drivers I used for this thing, before it died. If there are any you're looking for, but can't find anymore, tell me and I'll see if I have them. For the BT 370, I used version 6.3.0.6314 before the laptop died. Never had any issues with them (still have the driver).
2. I used Dell BIOS A09, which ran most stable for me without GPU throttling outside of excessively high temps in the 90s. Still have it if you want.
3. Once ATI made the 4670 a legacy card, newer legacy drivers did absolutely nothing for the system. Happened before that point even. Think I stopped updating after the 13.5 legacy driver even.
4. I have a couple Spyder ICC profiles I used on it with Win7 Ult. They gave me a warmer image that I liked (I found the image to bluish/cool without them). I have them if you ever want to try them. Used a program called powerstrip to make the profile permanent even in-game, which it wasn't for me.
5. Speaking of Win7 Ult, good job noticing that trick! When I once fresh installed on it, that same thing happened to me. Dell sent me another disk, so I got a free key from my replacement (using it now! )
6. If you're thinking about an extreme processor for in-game purposes, I don't think they'd make much of a difference at this point. Unless you want to go for it for fun, that i7-820QM will hold you off well enough. You don't need more heat in that thing. Maybe look into it if it's paired with an ATI 5730, which ran a bit cooler and faster.
7. I'd get a screen cloth protector (like Shaggymax) which I used to protect from scratching when closed. When shut the plastic over the RGB-LED tended to sag onto the keyboard, so it could pick up key smudges/scratches without a cloth. The cloth gave me peace of mind when transporting it. Yea and keep that very thin plastic sheath on the hinge, good point. Never took mine off, never had issues.
8. One thing about the SATA controller on this system is, if I remember right, it was only SATA 2. Therefore, SATA3 SSDs can not really run at max speed on it. Now that I moved that SSD over to my new system with a SATA3 port, it's running at full speed...so it had somewhat been on vacation in the 1645 .
9. Did I say that screen was awesome, because it was ! Best of that time and unique even now! Enjoy your system! I will honestly say I miss using my 1645 a bit !