dell tech disabled 2 cores on xps 1645??

Hey,

I think the dell tech who was supposed to replace the heatsink also disabled 2 of my cores on my corei7 quad. On cpuz it is only showing up as 2 and same with on device manager. here is a screen shot:



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If this is the case dell really has something coming to them. I hope it wasnt the case that just because i complained of heat issues they would disable my cpu even more. Unbelievable, it is disabled, just ran wprime and it took 32 seconds (slower than my old t7500!!). this is ridiculous, i am calling them right now.

 

yeah 2 cores have been disabled all right. You'd better call them ASAP.

 

It sounds like a BIOS option might be enabled to disable cores. Can you go into the BIOS and look around?

 

ya i fiddled around in the bios to get it working again, man dell is useless. they come to fix my comp and instead they make it worse!

 

i think there should actually be 8 threads listed in the picture you send. so they disabled 3 of the 4 physical cores, and 6 of the 8 threads!

 

If I were you I would make a big deal about this. I don't know Dell's policy, but I'm pretty sure they have to tell you what they "fix" when they fix it. Anything else is unauthorized use of your computer.

 

i am assuming that he could have dont it on purpose to reduce the heating issue... i mean i dont see how replacing a heatsink would cause the software related issue....

 

Oh i was ready to make a huge deal about this. If they did it on purpose that would be pretty serious as an unsuspecting person would not know to check and would never know what happened. However, for now i am willing to believe that it was by accident as i got i fixed it myself with relative ease. If this happens again though i will be sure to let them have it.

 

and this is why Dell wins and its customers always lose..

giving them too many excuses and 2nd chances..sigh..

 

Dell doesn't even have options in the BIOS to do this. If Dell really did something to disable them, they probably changed one of the Windows debugging options to disable certain features (see msconfig). Otherwise your hardware or software were probably malfunctioning, possibly related to some other change Dell made...

 

I had a similar problem with my first 1645. When the tech came and replaced the motherboard, the cpu lost 2 of the cores. However, later when I rebooted the computer it recognized it as a quad core again. In my case the whole repair was faulty as the cpu temp would go to 99C under load so Dell ended up giving me a new computer.

 

re-flash the BIOS

 

whatd they give you? another 1645?

 

i am having this exact problem . What did you do to fix it?

 

The repair/service man can access other functions in the bios that are locked down. You can download a modified bios from this forum, search 'overclocking bios' to download an unlocked bios and then reenable the cores yourself. Easy peasy. I use it to disable hyperthreading and works great.

 

do they have a unlocked bios for the xps 15?

also with the new bios, can the CPU be overclocked?

 

Not for xps 15 yet that I know of. And no you cannot overclock it with the bios.

 

It only allows clock control of the graphics card.