Impressions after 1-wk of 1558 and questions on the issues I have encountered

I have started this separate thread to get more visibility (for now) but this can be merged into the master 1558 thread eventually.

I have the laptop for 1 week now

Pros:
• Great screen, 1080p screen is easily the best thing about the laptop. Very bright and sharp.
• I5-520m is quite fast. Good enough for most task and even some gaming, I ran the beta of Starcraft for a dew mins and it ran at mid to high settings for most (I have 4570 GPU)
• 6200N is a good card and is much faster than the g card I was using in Vostro. Connects to the router in about 10 secs if I turn it off and then turn it on while laptop is on.
• 9 cell battery performance is decent, I think I get about 4 hours of use with light to middle load of use. With very light use I should be well over 4 hours.

Cons:
• Slot DVD player is noisy, makes one loud clicking noise when every you boot the laptop. Sometimes there are two clicks.
• Froze one time when I booted up one morning, had to reboot again by holding the power button. Not sure what happened there.
• Biggest issue is heat for me, coming from a 14” Vostro I thought this will produce less heat but it seems to produce the same amount. The touchpad is quite hot to the touch as well as the bottom area just below the laptop. These external temps do not fluctuate much with the change in the core temps, at least that is what it seems to me. My core temps have not been too bad. 35-38C idle, 40-46C with light use (internet surfing), ~50-55C watching youtube etc. 70-74C when stressed 100% for 5 minutes. So what can be done about heat as that is my biggest concern and I have to decided if I want to keep this laptop. I opened the bottom cover and saw the CPU is smack under it. CPU is quite small and the heatsink as well. I could not see where the fan is but it does not seem close to the CPU so no wonder you cannot get heat to get out. Has anyone tired put a larger heatsink over the CPU or put thermal paste?
• Fan Control is very poor but I am optimistic that eventually DELL can update bios to address that. Fan turning on and off every minute is not acceptable.
• Has anyone noticed some light vibration around the touch pad area, when you put your hand to feel it? My laptop seems to have it and it is the highest close to the touch pad area. Not sure if it is the fan or CPU or the DVD player.


Anyway need 1558 users advice as I would like to make the decision on this laptop if I want to keep it. I got it as refurb so the price is quite good for the specs but I do not want it to die after a year and a half.

 

I registered on the forum to respond to your post and add my own critique of my refurbished Dell Studio 1558 - owned for approximately 2 weeks.

1. I have the western digital 320gig 7200rpm drive (listed in device manager as "WDC WD3200BEKT-75F3T0 ATA Device". The drive has three problems - vibration, heat, and clicking noises from the head parking too often. What you have mentioned about the left palm area is exactly what I'm experiencing. I ran the WD diagnositics application and the harddrive passed all the tests, yet I still think the drive's problems are magnified by the Dell Studio 1558 case.

2. I have the 1080p LED screen. The screen is very nice - bright and clear. However, I have noticed the entire screen glitches with wavy pixels upon certain system events. I'm not sure what causes the problem, but seemingly if an application changes the resolution or I wake the computer up from sleep - the wavy pixels will appear. In my two weeks of owning the laptop I have seen the issue appear appropriately a dozen times.


This could also be a power or interference issue. I have the 65w slim power cord atm. Any ideas?

*Edit: The wavy pixels are easily fixed by changing the screen resolution then changing back to the default resolution in preferences. Yet, I should not have to troubleshoot the screen this way. Even after a Dell tech uninstalled and reinstalled the Dell intelHD gfx drivers the problem persists.

3. The keypad is very loud. Clicky. I don't notice any flex in my keyboard, but others have suggested it.

4. The fan speed control is flawed. 30 seconds off. 30 seconds on high is not acceptable.

5. The DVD drive does indeed make a loud "click" during system startup. I assume this event is normal - the drive is checking for alternate boot media (aka a windows start up disk, etc)

6. The media keys are mapped to the F1-F12 keys. To use the F1-F12 key functions you must use ( Function key + F1-F12). Very annoying if you frequently need to use the function keys in your applications.

I am contacting dell regarding the screen and the harddrive. The system is very nice, aforementioned issues aside.

 

Thanks for the feedback, here is my take on the issues you have raised
1. You are right it may be the hard drive that is casuing the very slight vibration that can be felt when you touch the area around the laptop. I have the 500GB HD(need to check the brand). Funny thing is that the vibrations are gone when the fan is on. I think it is how the HD is mounted and at low speed it must be vibrating to much as it is not secure enough on the chasis. I bet if we turn of the indexing it will go away as indexing results in slow speed rotation of HD all the time.

2. I have not noticed the resolution/pixel issue but i have seen a glitch or maybe a flicker once in a while and Ithink that what you meant. Not sure why it is there but maybe others can confirm if they have it too. I have the 4570GPU and also the 90W supply so you can rule out the PS. Maybe you should check it if it exist with with laptop running on battery...
Post if you find the issue with the wavy pixels.

3. I am ok with how loud the keyboard although I do feel some flexmore then my old Vostro 1400. Not a big problem for me.

4. I am hoping dell comes with a better fan speed management system soon.

5. DVD is very annoying, my 1340 has the same slot type DVD but no such noise. Mine is I think Hitachi brand, what is yours? Also sometime when you boot up it make the thud noise twice rather than once.

6. Agree with the use of the keys although I do not use use them much so I can live with them. My bigger problme is that there is no HD activity light or when the BT or Wireless is on. they are very helpflul beats going and checking them on the system tray.


What about heat?
How hot is it on th ebottom below the trackpad and what about on and near the tackpad?

 

That isnt your CPU that is the chipsets main processor for controlling Sata,PCI-E,USB,SD readers etc etc...

What your looking at there is the back of the motherboard.You have to take the motherboard out of the laptop case and turn it over to get to the CPU and GPU.

 

If you go into your bios at startup and change your boot preferences to not include the dvd, then it should stop looking for media and making the clicking noise you mentioned at startup, if you need to boot from the dvd player later at some time, then it's easy to just change the boot preferences back...

 

If you go into your bios at start up, you can make F1-F12 keys as primary keys. Then the primary keys by default have to be used with function key

 

You are right I know that the made the icore at 32nm but that does not shrink this to only 1cm x 1cm CPU.
So what is causing the heat under the puchpad? Is it still the CPU under the touchpad.

 

Good tip, will do it as it is quite annoying.

Maybe we should start a 1558 tweak forum. When I got the Vostro1400 2.5years ago someone had made a tweak thread and it was very helpful. It included just the things like you had mentioned.

 

well I tried but my only choice is to change the order I cannot disable CD/DVD. Default is HDD but it still goes down the list and checks the CD/DVD. I made CD?DVD last choice so the click now happen it is just a second later than usual.

If you know how to disable please post.

 

usually doing what you did and moving the boot preference to hdd first should keep it from looking for a boot disk in the dvd drive, maybe someone else has a suggestion, anybody?

 

No ur cpu lies far away from ur touchpad.It can be the wifi card thats generating a lot of heat and causing the touchpad and nearby area to get warm.Try using the system without wifi enabled and see if its still hot.

 

thanks for the tip will see. If it happens to be the wifi car(I have 6200N) I guess I am toast. can it be changes??

Btw, HDD is just there too but that is too much heat to be produced from the HDD.

 

Its a design issue and if its due to wifi card then it doesn't means that ur wifi card is faulty.I've a 5300 and it does gets quite hot.

 

You are right if this is the wireless card (6200N in my case) then you are right there is no real air flow there only some holes on the bottom.

 

I don't know about the studio 15 but I know on my XPS units a large chunk of the palm heat comes from the hard drive when it is really being taxed. My 7200 runs a lot warmer than my 5400 drive. also I am sure when the entire system is under load, it is a combination of that and the other components. With Dell's design, the HD ends up being in the slimmest part of the laptop with least breathing room.
I guess something had to go there...and well the hard drive is probably the cheapest thing to replace in the event of failure. At least that is my theory behind the placement.

I have just ordered a studio 1558. It will be my first time in many years buying a non XPS branded laptop. I hope I won't be dissapointed.

 

I think xps has a better gpu and ofcourse RGBLED would be great(though s15 have awesome screens too).also do i need to mention that there is no metal on the studio as well.
Though i think 1558 is also a good one if u don't care abt the GPU too much.
Good luck for ur new notebook

 

1) Clicking isn't so bad, but I tend to just sleep it instead of shutdown/sleep
2) Mine has only done that only on a cold boot so far. Just got it yesterday, and I reloaded a pile of drivers, so we'll see how it goes.
3) Heat is a little annoying, but okay. I've got mine propped up pretty far on top of the rise from a 9-cell, so my airflow is pretty solid.
4) Once the laptop's warmed up, the fan speed stays pretty consistent. Only really annoying when I've just started up or doing something intensive.
5) Yes. I suspect it's a fan or HD, but it's not the DVD.

 

I saw a picture of one once ...

There is a heat sink sitting right the touch pad.

 

hi there...

I am new to this forum and have a question regarding screen resolution on my studio 1558 w/ 1080p that I got as a replacement from dell. Whenever, I open a webpage, i comes up centered in the screen and the text is really small to read at all. I have to zoom in everytime and and not very comfortable. Are there anyways to get around this problem?? Thanks in advance.

 

If your running Windows 7 go into your control panel under Fonts.There is a option to adjust your font size there.