---> OFFICIAL: Dell STUDIO 14z Owner's Lounge <---

Here's are a couple more direct side view comparisons to the Macbook:

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/E0Dmrf5YtnxPBP5XwXRj_w?authkey=Gv1sRgCOelpL74gKPQEw&feat=directlink

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/fBVTWb8J-SUT04JUFR9WnQ?authkey=Gv1sRgCOelpL74gKPQEw&feat=directlink

 

Page 16 of the Studio setup guide has some notes on the PowerShare feature.
1. Certain USB devices may not charge when the computer is powered off or in sleep state. In such cases turn on the computer to charge the device.
2. If you turn off your computer while charging a USB device, the device will stop charging. To continue charging, disconnect the USB device and connect it again.
3. The USB PowerShare is automatically shut off when only 10% of the total battery life remains.

 

Thank you. Exactly what I was looking for.

 

Hi all,
I received my 14z about a week ago and I'm loving it.

1) FYI- I ordered one of the built NY 14" cargo sleeves from dell ($20 with education discount), and while it is generally nice, the sleeve is obviously built for larger notebooks (Inspiron 14.1") and leaves quite a bit of wiggle room. So go with the advice of others and look for a 13" sleeve.

2) I have a question that I was hoping your collective intelligence could help me solve. I purchased a DisplayPort to VGA adapter from newegg (startech - http://www.startech.com/item/DP2VGA-DisplayPort-to-VGA-Video-Adapter-Converter.aspx) because I do presentations using a VGA projector and have a VGA monitor at work to use as a second display. The problem is that when I hook up the adapter the maximum resolution I can get out of the projector/display is 640x480. I'm not sure if this is a driver issue or configuration issue. Does anyone have any ideas to resolve this?

 

Is that the maximum resolution you can select in the Resolution combo-box in the Screen Resolution dialog window?

 

I'm running Windows 7 RC 32-bit, and I'm really hoping that my problems are just due to the fact that there aren't enough 'official' drivers out yet.

All this started ever since I upgraded the bios to A03.

Problem #1: When booting on battery, as soon as the fastaccess facial recognition software tries to initialize the webcam at the login screen, the computer freezes completely. I left it there for 30 min in case it was just wanting to think about it, but no, it's frozen.

Note: This does not happen while the computer is plugged in.



Problem #2: This has always been an issue, or moreso a quesiton for everyone. The 14z has a full mini pcie slot, is there a way to let it accept a wireless lan card in that spot? I have a Intel 5300 full minipcie, and a Intel 5100 Half mini, 5100 is ok, but it's my roommates and I'd like to be able to get my 5300 working in the "WWAN" slot. Any help on that?


Also a note to anyone who may be trying to use GRUB as a bootloader for your laptop. Bios A03 fixes an issue with grub that causes the timeout not to function properly. Once you upgrade, grub will function like normal.

 

What's the normal max resolution? Also, have you tried adding the display to the desktop instead of using it as a secondary?

 

Release this in AUS already Dell!! Sick of waiting!

 

I don't know what the 'normal' max resolution. The monitor I'm trying to use is widescreen and isn't more than a couple years old (it has a dvi and vga input and is manufactured by dell).

When I go to display properties and attempt to adjust the resolution the only choice I get is 640x480. If I run it as a desktop extension my laptop can still run at 1600x900, and if I display the same signal on both laptop and monitor then my laptop display gets downgraded to 640x480.

I haven't done a whole lot of additional tinkering with it yet, but I will tomorrow at work. I was hoping someone else has successfully setup a second display or used an adapter with the 14z...

 

I heard that 5300 doesn't work well with this nVidia chipset. It could be one of the reasons Dell is not offering it with 14z (usually Dell offers both 5100 and 5300 with other models). But I'm not 100% sure about that.

 

I guess this means that it's some sort of driver issue on your computer - it can't be the cable or the monitor as you can do well above that. You did try to go into display settings and raising it from there, right?

 

just a thought but the display port is digital and the vga is analog unless there is some sort of decoder chip in the cable it wont work well.

If it is just a straight cable you wont be able to get full resolution. check out monoprice.com for hdmi-vga or display port -vga solutions they are more expensive than just a cable and they have some sort of electronics in them to decode the digital signal.

 

Well I have the 5100 working, but it has some issues with power savings mode, and I can't turn off the wireless via the hotkey because when I turn it back on, it will not see any networks, and if I disable the wireless in the control panel, the computer freezes, lol. I'm hoping that part is only because of driver issues. Otherwise I may have to find a new wireless card.

Does anyone have any suggestions on a good wireless N card? It has to be dual band a/b/g/n, and half-mini.

 

I have what appears to be the Dell Wireless 1515 adapter, and I'm trying to change the power mode from maximum performance to power saving, but I can't find the setting. Anyone have any idea where this is?

 

Hey guys,

I am wondering about overclocking the 14z. Has anyone done it? Which programs did you use? What programs would be best? How much of an improvement did you experience?

I am playing COD:5 and I would like a little better resolution with the same performance. It's hard to play online at the moment with a resolution of 720x480 in order to maintain 25-30+ FPS. Thanks guys...

 

right click the battery icon in the tray, change settings, advanced settings.

 

Thanks - #2 explains what I was experiencing. I disconnected and reconnected after putting my computer to sleep and the charging worked fine.

 

Overclocking wont help you get better resoluton in cod 5 the limit to that is the video card. Overclockning in my view will have little real world advantage for gaming.

The big disadvantage to OC is the extra heat that will be produced. This is a small laptop and getting rid of heat is an issue for any small computer especially since your options for increasing the cooling are limited.

I think that you will likley have to cope with lower resolution on this laptop while playing games or get a gameing laptop.

 

yep - found it. Thanks.

Now I want to see how this affects battery life.

 

I'm getting an intermittent sharp clicking sound (maybe once every 30 seconds or so) from the right side of my laptop when it is under light stress surfing the web. Does anyone know what might be causing it. Is it the hard drive?

It also seems to want to crash the browser (it goes white and the pointer shows the loading sign) when there doesn't seem to be too much going on.

 

On the contrary, overclocking helps very much with in game performance often times boosting performance as much as 20-25%. I think the 14z probably has really good overclocking potential because it deals with heat already so very well already. Even when I playing CoD5, the temperatures (at least on the external) are hardly noticeably greater than when just idling.

No offense, but please has anyone who has actually TRIED overclocking their 14z had any success? I will give it a go when I find some free time.

Nameless1, that could be your hard drive. I'm not sure though. My hard drive clicks every now and then. If it's really noticeable, I'd give Dell support a phone call.

 

yeah not sure how it affects battery life, but it didnt really affect performance for me when doing speedtests at least

 

The part I've highlighted in bold really is the downfall of your comment. The reason the temperature differences are hardly noticeable is because the CPU is not used massivle in that game. Therefore, you will not see a massive improvement; you will see some, but with certainly the region of 20-25% is out of the question.

The only reason you'd see some improvement in modern games is that if they are CPU intensive in the slightest then the CPU gets the work done marginally faster and therefore the GPU can start it's work sooner - it therefore will be able to render marginally more frames per second.

Now if you were talking about a crazy overclock, say going from 1.86GHz to 3GHz or higher, then I'd say you'd maybe see 20-25% increase, especially as some games are more CPU intensive (like have lots of pathing / physics calculations that have to be done).

Overclocking a notebook though, you'd never get to the crazy overclocks you'd need to see that level of improvement without causing issues with heat.

Anyway, that only really helps if you have a decent GPU, which the Studio does not have. It has an ok GPU, but it's not going to be able to render 20% more frames by simply overclocking the CPU.

Lets do some math:

Say your GPU renders a frame in 0.03 seconds and your CPU sends the frame data to the GPU after taking 0.01 seconds to do it's work. In 1 second, you will render 1/(0.03+0.01) = 25 frames.
OK, so let's work this backwards. 20% increase in FPS (5 frames in this case, so in total you want 30 frames rendered, which takes 0.9 seconds, then the CPU has to send the data for 30 frames in 0.1 second, which means it needs to do it's thing for each chunk of data in 0.003 seconds. OK, so that is about 3 times faster than it was running before.

Show me a CPU you have been able to overclock by that much in a notebook.....In fact, I'd like to see the desktop CPU that has been overclocked by that much.

OK, so let's say that you have a faster GPU, but the game is CPU intensive, so lets say your GPU only takes 0.01 seconds, but your CPU takes 0.02 seconds. You'd still need to increase your CPU speed by a third, so that is like taking a 2.4GHz CPU up to a 3.1GHz speed. You'd have heat issues.

 

I definitely don't want this to turn into a flame war, because those are just silly.

First, when I made my comment, I was referring to overclocking in notebooks in general. I don't know the potential of the 14z, that's why I was asking. And yes, many notebook users have seen a 20% + increase in performance through overclocking there GPU.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=328025&highlight=dv5t+overclocking

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=299785&highlight=dv5t+overclocking

I did some investigating with overclocking and have done overclocking in the past. It is quite possible to see a 30% increase gaming performance through some graphics cards, at the very least with a dedicated graphics option. I am not sure if the overclocking potential decreases with an integrated chip, but I don't think it does. In fact, I believe integrated chips might even OC better than dedicated.

Here is a quote from someone who did just that in the second link above:

Second, I was referring to overclocking the GPU, not the CPU... which is traditionally the more important item to overclock in 3d gaming since processors are rarely the bottleneck in a machine so I don't know why you made all of these references to overclocking the CPU...

Anyway... my high hopes remain intact... for now...

 

Because nobody specified it was the GPU, yourself included.

Go ahead and overclock your GPU to your hearts content. It's your motherboard, not mine. Personally, if I want better gaming performance, I accept that I need to spend a bit more than the money that is spent on a Studio 14z.

 

Yeah, I guess we were talking apples and oranges. I'm downloading ntune tonight. We'll see what happens...

 

Remember slow but sure

Be interesting to find out if Dell has locked them down; mind you, probably get around that by flashing it.

 

my comments regarding oc was specifically referring to the cpu( i think that was clear from my comments). I cant imagine 20-25% improvement with oc the cpu. I'm sure you could increase frame rates by pumping more juice through the GPU but given that it is integrated to the mobo I think that it could be a very expensive experiment!

I can just imagine how the conversation with Dell goes
customer:" hi I just blew up my mobo my trying to oc the integrated graphics card. Is this covered by warrenty?"
Dell:"absolutely we would love to replace your mobo....sorry just kidding of course it's not covered but we would love to sell you a new one for $500.. Thank you for calling Dell did I answer all of your questions?"

I'm not sure how you get the 14z copes with heat so well. It has one heatsink type fan and several air vents on the bottom hardly and advanced cooling system. The systems that I have oc all had huge heat sinks, 4 or 5 fans and lots of space for air to move around and they can still get hot. dont get me wrong it does very well for what it intended to do which is mobile computing but a desktop replacement or gameing computer it is not.

 

For those of you with the BSoDs, I reported having the BSoD several times and then the next day no longer. Not sure what happened but no updates or anything got installed--including SP2 because when I was going to install it, it said something about some drivers will not work with SP2 and well everything has been working fine with SP1 so I didn't want to begin to have problems--so I left it as is.

So no more BSoD, which is weird. But HEY! I'm happy! And as usual, I assume it is VISTA not hardware as W7 users seem to not have had BSoD (or at least as much as Vista users).

That being said, those of you that have Vista installed and are/were having BSoDs; what BIOS version are/were you on? I've been on A01 this entire time. I saw a few posts back that A03 seems to correct these BSoDs...how true is this?

And those of you that installed SP2 on Vista did you also install BIOS A03 and any problems with drivers or crashes (BSoD)??? Still debating if I should upgrade to SP2 and get the latest BIOS as my 14z seems to be doing fine now; don't want to start having problems again.

Thanks in advance!

 

Update regarding displayport to VGA adapter... appears to be no easy solution (maybe nvidia driver issue - I've seen similar problems with apple's minidisplayport when run on bootcamp). My IT guy suggested getting a displayport to DVI adapter for the monitor I have and trying a DVI-VGA adapter on that for older projectors... will update you with the results.

 

15% off outlet inspiron or studios: RLN3FZRHBWJXS7 (expires 9/9 or after 750 uses)

i ordered a really basic 14z with a 6 cell battery and a 720p screen and a macked out penryn 900p screen version with an 8-cell battery. i'll only be keeping one though. if anyone is interested in seeing side by side pics of the 900p screen next to the 720p i'll be posting pics up in a week or so after i get my order. i'm also going to try and weigh the 6 and 8 cell batteries to see what the real weight difference is between the two and if it's anywhere close to 1/2 a pound or not.

 

After lurking here a few days and doing TONS of research, I finally pulled the trigger today on a refurbished 14z from Dell Home Outlet. FYI, I went with Midnight Blue/P8600/900p/320GB 5400/Back-lit/6-cell. I couldn't find a good match for me with an 8-cell, but for my uses (couch browsing, mostly), I figure a 6-cell will be fine (hopefully close to 3 hrs of light use).

Now I want to pick up a new external drive to replace an old one I'm selling with my previous laptop, an HP tc1100. I'm leaning towards a slim Blu-Ray drive (~$80 on eBay), or maybe just a DVD drive. It looks like all of these external USB-powered drives requre 2 USB ports, although it appears only one may be needed when not burning. Would any of you be kind enough to share your experiences with external USB-powered devices? I *really* don't want to use both USB ports when only reading DVDs or Blu-Ray discs.

Thanks!

 

The eSATA blu-ray drive option is about $140 I believe and is powered by the eSATA port itself. I am using it myself and am really glad I picked it up.

If you already ordered your system just call and have them add it to your order. It ships separately and shouldn't change anything with your current order, other than price of course.

 

Thanks for the suggestion -- I might have to look into that. It's a bit more than I wanted to spend, but that's how it goes.

 

The only eSATA Blu-Ray drives on Dell's site all range between $250 and $350. There is the $90 eSATA DVD drive, which I'd consider, but it's not clear that it, too, doesn't require both the eSATA *and* USB ports. I may just end up going with a solution that uses an AC adapter. Sigh.

 

The Dell eSATA drives uses only the combo eSATA/USB port on the 14z - it does not require the use of 2 separate ports.

The price really ticks me off - I bought mine less than a month ago for $120 from Dell. Oh well - my loss may be your gain.

 

I got my eSATA Blu-Ray drive for $140 with my build. looks like its 25 more now though. I still think it's worth it.

 

Matt, do you have a URL for that drive? I don't see any eSATA Blu-Ray drives that cheap on Dell's site. I'm thinking right now of ordering the $90 eSATA DVD
drive...

Thanks,
Brent

 

Thanks for the coupon! I cancelled today's order and was able to find a machine with the same makeup, plus the 8-cell battery and 7200rpm drive and SAVE $25. Had to settle for Ruby Red instead of Midnight Blue, but I am thrilled. BTW, I think I just squeaked in as the coupon may have already expired!

Brent

 

I changed my order from the dvd drive to the blu-ray drive and they canceled my order of both the dvd drive and the computer and had to reorder both of them even though they ship separately so you may want to ask before you change your order.

 

newegg usually has MUCH cheaper options than dell. For example, USB DVD drive for $50 (vs. $90 or $120 from dell). I would order a drive from them, although I haven't checked out their bluray options.

 

Yes, I have. The thing is that all the "USB powered" drives require (or *may* require 2 USB ports: 1 data, 1 power. I don't want to tie up both ports for a DVD player. Dell has an eSATA drive that only requires the USB port, for $90, which I am leaning toward. Newegg does not have any eSATA external DVD or Blu-Ray drives, I believe.


Thanks,
Brent

 

I had only ordered the laptop. They cancelled it properly and I was able to order another refurb shortly after, using the 15% off coupon. Saved a bunch! Still wish I could have found another one in Midnight Blue, but with refurbs you don't get every option you might want.

 

yea when i was shopping the refurbs i just decided to get the chainlink black color. i didn't feel like paying extra for the colors, although i know i'll get bored of the black pretty quick.

 

I don't know which BIOS I have (I assume still A01 unless it updated it to A03 automatically). I started getting blue screened around the same time other people on here were last week. I thought it was fixed with an update the day after the big update last week (sorry i'm not getting too technical lol) but then it started blue screening me again. The other night I go in in safe mode (it prompted me to) and it prompts me to have microsoft troubleshoot the cause of the irregular shutdown so I let them troubleshoot it and it suggests I uninstall one of the updates from last week and tells me how to do it - no blue screens ever since, knock on wood

 

this is exactly what happened to me last week. Confirmed the Microsoft suggestion to uninstall elsewhere on the web. After I uninstalled (KB973879) everything's been working just fine. I did not install A03 due to problems reported in this thread and elsewhere. Also running Vista.

Anyone know if the A03 issues have been resolved?

 

i don't have any issues with A03..

 

A03 issues have not been resolved, only way to fix them was to downgrade to A01. They won't "fix" A03 they will just release a new revision sooner or later.

 

This is a hard one to beat: http://www.pcconnection.com/IPA/Sho...36&CustomerMemberID=A11A0C176424C0A00176424A0

Ouch!

YARR!
}:^)~

 

Hey guys, I'm (sorta) new to the forum. "Sorta" because I've been lurking around here for a long time, though I'm just now posting for the first time.

I ordered a 14z last week (Aug 24) and the expected delivery date is Sep 18.

Midnight Blue
P8600
3GB RAM
320 GB (5400 rpm)
900p
8-cell
back-lit keyboard

This thread has provided some good info, I appreciate it and I'm looking forward to getting the lappy.