Owner's Thread: Dell Inspiron 7000 series

I probably should have said every model except the Inspiron 15 7000 with this highest option package...

 

hi, i have dell 7537 with intel i5.
it's have "LG Philips LGD03DF (156WHU [DELL P/N: 35T9M])" monitor. Any color calibration profile ?

Also how to get 300 Mbps speed in wifi (my dell have Intel Dual Band Wireless-N 7260 BGN 2x2 HMC WiFi Adapter), usually just get 144 Mbps ?

thanks in advance

 

I uploaded a short crappy video of the wobble here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/90593331/VID_20140423_220915.mp4
It has to be on a hard, flat surface to wobble. You guys can confirm it's not normal then?

 

well pal. I really don't know what to tell you. It's nothing too serious to be alarmed about. I believe every laptop behaves like that not just this model.

 

My charger doesn't come like that. It won't light up whenever I plug in.

 

Has anybody tried multiple gestures on chorme, doies it work? My three-finger swipe sometimes doesn't work on chrome. Just want to know if there is a problem with my track pad. But other gestures works just fine.

 

I don't know about three-fingers but four-fingers swipes work wonder to change tabs in Chrome. But my trackpad was very erratic out of the box so be sure to update your drivers either from Synaptics or Dell. Now that it is broken in my only complain is that the area just above the two buttons is less responsive than the center of the trackpad. Otherwise it's great.

You were 100% right. I checked at Best Buy today and pretty much every laptop's lid wobbles this way. It doesn't bother me actually, but it would have driven me nuts to be left with a defective 1 000$ machine, even if fully functional.

I'm done finding flaws in my Inspiron, now is time to love it (and there's plenty to love).

 

Okey... So about two weeks ago I bought Inspiron 7537 and I think it's time to give a little feedback on what I like and dislike about this great piece of machine.

I have Inspiron 7537, 256GB SSD, 16GB DDR3 RAM, nVidia GeForce 750M, i7 4500U. (Also bought Dell Alienware TactX mouse) And I'm running on Windows 7 x64 because I got rid of Windows 8 after 30 minutes of using it. I don't really use touchscreen, so I don't care. It kinda works nicely even with Windows 7 and it's without tons of useless preinstall apps and stuff.

For the record I will be comparing a lot to my 5 years old Dell Latitude E6500 which is business class laptop. (Means expensive with good build quality even to standards nowadays) Also before I start I would like to point out, that:
I DO NOT have a wifi card issue. It works just fine. Actually even a bit better than my wifi in old Latitude.
I DO NOT have a hissing sound issue. It showed up just once or twice at the very beginning. But now it's completely gone. I'm pretty sure it is a driver thing. I do not use realtek drivers, just native Windows 7 drivers.

I will start with cons: (one con)
- Just a really little and for most people really unimportant drawback is its charger which kinda requires some strength to push it in or out from the device. It's nothing too serious. It's just that if someone stumble over the cable he might get your laptop on the ground instead of just pulling the cable out. So it's not like Apple's magnetic chargers.

Neutral stuff:
* Keyboard took me about three days to get used to. But that's what happens when you work for 5 years on a different keyboard. Now I find it perfectly ok. I don't know what it's about all those 'flex' reviews of keyboards. I think it doesn't flex at all. And yes, if I push with all my strength it flexes, but no more than really high quality build old Latitude. So...perfectly ok!
* I personally do like layout of ports. But it's on everybody's preferences and room they are using laptop in.
* Glossy screen. I personally DO NOT like it. Good old Latitude's matte screen. On the other hand I was really afraid of reflections and it's really quite ok and it gives me more vivid colors on the other hand. Still...I would trade for matte, though. But this option is not available if you want full hd, which is absolutely must have for me. Screen brightness is ok. Could be a little bit better, could be much worse. I'm working on around 60% of brightness usually. In work I'm in a really bright room so I'm on 80-100% and it's fine. But in comparison to my old Latitude where I was using 20-60% it is a difference. (According to notebookcheck's review Inspiron 7000 has average brightness over 260nits, my old Latitude 300nits)
* Again depends on point of view - Inspiron has some functions bind to buttons F1-F12. Instead of pressing fn+F1-F12 to use this function it is the other way around. You press just F1-12 to use the function it is bind to (sound up/down, brightness, play/pause...) and you have to use fn+F1-12 for standard functions like reload of a webpage fn+F5 or closing a window fn+alt+F4. I hope I find some utility which makes it the other way around. It is annoying to me while in work as I use F5 a lot. On the other hand at home while relaxing I like it better the way it is.

Pros:
+ AMAZING build quality. Like seriously I want to touch this lady all the time! Feels so cool (literally) because even while playing games, palmrest has this cold feeling to it.
+ Great performance. I have to say I didn't even notice to ever use turbo. I play just League of Legends and this game obviously doesn't require it. (Everything on highest setttings, everything turned on, 1920x1080 resolution and I have 60fps, sometimes in teamfights it drops to around 40, 45. I wanted to keep that 60fps number so I have shadows now on high instead of very high. Also I'm using WinRar quite a lot. It is blazing fast now! Also thanks to SSD but as I was afraid of 4500U performance I'm not anymore. At least for my tasks it's totally sufficient so far. I'm gonna try render some full hd video soon so I'll keep you updated on that as well.
+ Build in microphone is to what I'm used to high above average.

+ Really not sure about other major pros right now. I just want to let you know I'm overall really, really pleased with this machine. Works like a charm form me. So totally recommend it if you are hesitating and reading through forums like I did.


Have a nice day everybody,
Petroit

 

Hi, I just received yesterday and I absolutely love it, the problem is, however, I found that under certain dark background I can see the waves or patterns moving from bottom to the top, do I need to worry about that? Please, I don;t know if this is the screen problem even though I ran diagnose yesterday and found no error message displayed.

 

It's kindda hard to imaginge the prob without a visual evidence to look at, mate. At first, I thought it had something to do with the image retention prob, or screen backlight bleeding issue but now I'm totally clueless. Heh.
PS: good to know someone is liking the laptop like I am although I do prefer matte screens as it will be brighter compared to touch ones and it'll be thinner too.

 

Oh, no, mine wobbles under those circumstances also, and even when I tap it. It has to be on a flat, hard surface, though, as you say. I can't think why that would be a problem, mind you.

 

Which specific wireless card did it come with?

 

It says Intel(R) Wireless-N 7260. Not sure though if it is or is not dual band.

 

O well mines in production so I will post my review when it arrives. Unfortunately cannot get a SSD option so that might be on the cards for an upgrade down the line.

 

Mine also will wobble, but it isn't a negative issue as far as I can see.

 

My 7537 screen flickers every so often, particularly when the hard drive can be heard to be clicking (I think that is what it is). That seems to divert power from the battery away from the screen which then flickers. Does anyone know what setting I can adjust to stop this happening? I read that there is an Intel setting in the thread that pertains to battery saving which can be turned off. Does anyone know where this is located, and what particular Intel device I am looking for from the control panel?

Also, can anyone comment on whether this effects general screen brightness. I had a 7537 from Dell outlet and the brightest setting seemed to be bright and had vivid colours. The display I have on the brand new 7537 is just about bright at best and does not seem to be as bright as the previous one.

 

Hello there,

I don't know right now if and where is this Intel settings you mentioned. But right now I'm on battery and I experience this flickering, really weak flickering, but only sometimes when brightness is set to lowest and I move my mouse. And it's really just rare and barely visible. But I think it has something to do with that power consumption setting which is really trying to save every bit of energy. I just restarted my laptop and trying to simulate it again and it's not flickering anymore... so... don't know. (I do have SSD disk, so no clicking noise here)

That brightness you mentioned. I don't know. My 5 year old Latitude was a bit brighter, but it was a matte screen. I find 7537 bright enough. But not bright enough with sun shining on it, that's for sure.


Battery life:
FYI. Right now I'm at work, obviously not working as hard as I should. Running Eclipse, MySQL Workbench, Chrome with 7 tabs - one of them is YouTube playing songs now and then. Connected to wifi and brightness set somewhere in the middle. All this since 11AM and I hit 50% battery life time at 15:20. That is a great battery life, IMHO. I'm pretty sure I won't have to bring my power supply with me unless doing some overtime.

EDIT: It's 18:20, I'm leaving with 7% (30min) of battery remaining. Last half an hour or 20 minutes or so I had turned off the battery saving mode.

 

Check the system BIOS... You can switch this behaviour there

 

does anyone know what are the steps to be able to boot from a USB drive on this laptop?
have to disable secure boot, enable legacy boot... do I need to change something in windows 8.1 before enabling/disabling anything on the BIOS? I want to be able to boot from a USB drive and that windows 8.1 continues to boot with no issues... is that possible?

thanks,

 

Don't need BIOS for that, can be switched on in Window Mobility Centre.

 

Bought the top 15" version with touch screen recently.
Installed all the latest updates and drivers from Intel.

Solved all but 3 problems:

1. Black levels are awful (adaptive brightness and intelligent display are OFF). In this test Black level - Lagom LCD test I can only see the 11th square on max brightness. I had to increase gamma 1->1.2 to be able to see at least 3rd square, but the whites are washed out a bit now. This heavily affects gaming too.
Could someone with IPS panel check this test and confirm which grade they can see there ? I am trying to see if the screen is faulty or it is common for IPS displays.

2. White nose in headphones - replaced Realtek drivers with Windows ones - it became quieter but still present. Can this be fixed fully somehow ?

3. Wifi - getting half of the speeds of my old laptop in the same spot. Also I had a few heavy lags in online games, but it is hard to identify it it was wifi card or router. Don't think I had on old laptop though.

Any advice is highly appreciated.
2.

 

1. Are you sure your panel is FHD one because the black level on mine is absolutely brilliant. It's pitch black I may say. Of course if you look at a picture in which black is not really black, you won't see it. But I'd recommend you use WMP, play a song and switch it to full screen with no effects, then you will see it's really good.
2. Agreed that the hissing sound is still there after installing Realtek but also the volume in general (not the hissing sound) is not as loud as before, I noticed. However, I don't have any trouble with it now because it's acceptable. Not sure how to get rid of it completely though.
3. I'm using 16.5.3.6 something driver for the wifi card. Other drivers messed me up real bad. I'd uninstall it completely from Device manager and do a restart, the laptop will install the driver on its own. That might help.

Peace.

 

Yes it is FHD, by bad black levels I mean that most darker shades of grey appear as blacks. When I play Diablo3 I can't see anything in dungeons on max brightness.
How does that test appear to you on 100% brightness ?

 

Can see down to square 4 on my IPS screen without changing gamma and on battery

No issues with headphone noise

wifi - what router are you using - have an ASUS RT-N66U and was getting good 300 Mbps with 240 Mbps throughput on 5Ghz. When flashed router with Tomato and DDWRT I was getting a lot slower speeds and sync , couldnt get over 144Mbps - its not the card but after reading around found that there are known issue with the version 6 driver of the Broadcom chip of the router with Intel Centrino so flashed the version 5 driver router firmware and all fixed. Otherwise have no issues with wifi speeds.

Last issue I was tearing hair out with was the Bluetooth (Mouse in my case but read a lot of other complaints for headphones etc) disconnects. The laptop would instantly give a code 43 under the Bluetooth 4.0 + HS Adapter and BT mouse stop working, Even if disabled power management on the BT adapter. Eventually fixed this by installing the latest BT driver on the dell site for the 7537,issue still there so removed the software and then installed the Bluetooth software on the Dell site for the 7537 but using the Windows 8 driver not 8.1 and all fixed !!! Happy now

My wireless driver is 17.0.0.34 by the way for the Dual Band Wireless-N 7260 and 3.1.1306.346 for the Bluetooth Adapter Driver to fix the BT disconnect issues.

An9rch1st

 

I'm thinking of buying a new laptop for daily use and some moderate gaming and the Inspiron 15-7537 caught my eye. This is the non-touch i5 version. But there are some things that I am worried about...it would be nice if someone can give me some clarification.

1. I have heard a lot of complains about the Dell build quality. What should be expected of the 7000 series?

2. Battery life -- as the battery is built-in and not very easy to remove, isn't it going to be exposed to high temperatures while using the laptop for intense tasks like gaming which generate heat? I know the normal battery life is very good but if I do some light to moderate gaming (4 to 5 hours a week, demanding games using the discrete GPU) would I soon end up with a halfway fried battery with a much reduced capacity?

Please share your thoughts on these questions. Thanks!

 

There are so many posts and articles on this laptop family online, if you are serious about buying one I would have a look at as many as you can which I did before purchasing.

I got a discount code for £50 off and waited for the £100 offer to bring my i7 version to under the price of the i5 version currently. In my view paying a little more (or less in my case) for the i7 was worth it.

Build quality is great with the Aluminium upper shell, gorilla glass and IPS screen on this one. Lovely Laptop. The keyboard is a bit naff though, dont like the key layout really, small enter key on UK version, crammed togehter, find the full numpad a waste of estate albeit sure it is useful for some people, backlight only has off, medium, full brightness and the keys dont light up fully - off grey colour on the keys is a bit cack - would have been nice with black keys and white key text but probably have Apple sue Dell for copying the Macbook...

But this laptop is so quiet, it purrs along. Swap out the drive and put an SSD in there for sure, Samsung EVO not the 840 pro (or another make as I don't work for Samsung honestly),boots up in a few seconds, just feels like a premium bit of hardware.

Anyway, i read some of the problems in several threads and but took the jump and don't regret it so far as the ones I encountered were software related and I've been able to fix by trial, error and with the help of other users.

 

Thanks! I am worried about the battery though....

 

I know I've read your question on other sites/forums on this last couple of days.

Haven't had any serious heating issues gaming so far, I mean it obviously has the Haswell battery life optimizations and as a general observation this laptop doesn’t heat up too much so battery discharge and wear is possibly not as bad in fact compared to some other laptops of this ilk - in one review have seen the battery life almost twice that of the HP Envy 15 at similar settings/workload which is the other laptop I believe you were looking at as an alternative.

PS i personally wouldnt go for the i5 7537 with lower screen resolution, you may regret it. This i7 panel is lovely at 1920x1080

An9rch1st

 

Try booting off a fat 32 formatted drive... Apparently you can't boot from NTFS formatted USB

 

I finally disabled secure boot and enabled legacy boot in the BIOS. then I could boot from a USB disk (didn't even try to boot into Windows 8 ). Then I set everything back to what it was on the BIOS and booted into Windows 8 normally. thanks anyway.

 

Yeah the Haswell aspect is something to think about. It does have an amazing battery life. I think I'll be fine with the 13668 x 768 resolution...the i7 is much more expensive in Russia where I live.

 

has anyone had a chance to look at the inspiron 5000 series? according to dell the 5000 is the newer model of the 7000

 

Had a 2 hr chat with Dell customer services:
1. Wifi - he changed the card channel to 11 and tested the broadband speed - it was the same as on my old laptop. I had it then tested a few hours later, and it showed 2-3Mbs again ... not sure how to test it properly.
2. Black levels - he said it was OK for an IPS screen and I should keep the increased gamma setting.
3. White noise in headphones - an engineer will be coming to replace motherboard.

 

My thought on the 5000 series after reviewing them on Dell website: mehhhhh. They're nothing but a bigger version of the 3000 series. The body is thicker than the 7000 and although I'd love to have a dark toned keyboard, I'd prefer the look and design of the 7000 ones. And most of them don't offer full HD except for the top tier 15in so if you don't mind 720p+ you can go with it.

 

I'm probably going to go pick up the 7000 from best buy for my mother. It seems like the only laptop within our budget with the least amount of problems. Unless anyone else can recommend something? The "what laptop should I buy?" forum has not be helpful at all.

 

If you are in US, is there no option to get the 1080p 750M version unless you order it from Dell directly?

 

I took the time to test the wifi connection this past week and it does drop an awful lot. I've got a 10M connection and it frequently drops to a frustrating... 0.5M, when and where other devices show 6 to 10M. My drivers are up to date and I understand that there's nothing I can do short of swapping the wifi card. But would a cheap usb wifi adapter also do the trick? (Like this one TP Link Wireless N150 Nano USB Adapter (TL-WN725N) : Wireless USB Adapters - Future Shop) Has someone tried one on the 7000?

 

I had the same connection drop issue, changing DNS to google public DNS worked for me. You should give it a try.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...o-public/56548e8d-eb9c-4fc5-807c-eefca5d278d0


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

Just received my Dell Inspiron 15 (7537), core i5-4200. It came with windows 8.1 pre-installed so I haven't had to deal with any updating issues.

I downloaded SlimDrivers Utility to see which, if any, drivers needed updating and it listed 3, two intel management drivers and the realtek audio driver.
I updated one intel driver however the other one failed to update. I haven't touched the realtek driver just yet.

That being said as of now (after a few hours of use) I have not had any issues *knock on wood*
- no wi-fi issues
- no white noise/clicking issues from the speakers. This is why i haven't touched the audio driver update.

I'm not planning on doing a clean install or upgrading to an SSD because this laptop will be used by my mother for very basic tasks. That being said if there are any other recommendations anyone could give me of things that I may have missed I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance.

 

i have laptop this laptop i7 version. I want to dual boot with ubuntu. will i have to disable secure boot and turn on legacy mode? please help

 

Hi guys! I have been considering to buy the Inspiron 7537 and I have read the whole thread for potential problems. The biggest for me is the white noise in the headphones. Can someone who has the issue try to boot a linux distribution and check if the speakers work correctly and if the white noisse is still persistent? Also note if the volume is at the same level as in Windows. I want to determine if it is a design or a software problem.

 

Hi, could zoou post the driver versions for both the wifi and the audio? Could people with the white noise post their audio driver versions as well?

 

That's great news! I wonder if the wifi problem is also caused by the drivers and if it would work flawlessly under linux.

 

Could you post which version of realtek drivers you have now? Did anyone else try updating their drivers and checking the white noise?

 

can you please explain how to install ubuntu?

 

You don't have to actually install it, just boot from the disc or a USB drive. To boot the disc just download the iso from ubuntu website. If you don't have an external DVD, then use this to make a bootable USB: How to create a bootable USB stick on Windows | Ubuntu

Did you try updating realtek drivers?

 

URGENT advice needed. *I still have 2 days left to return it to Best Buy*

For a while now I've wanted a laptop to edit MANY hours of 720p AVCHD (.mt2s) home movies. I really wanted something portable with an i7, Windows based that looked and had the dimensions of a MacBook Pro and was bellow $1,000. I feel/felt I found it in the new Inspiron 14 7437 until I started having issues.

The first 7437 crashed (HD) in 22 hours. Changed it.

The second seems to be working fine but the wifi speed I get is SLOW. I have close to100Mbps on the hardwired home PC and just feet away I get 15-20 Mbps on the 7437 while I get 50-60 Mbps on my iPad and iPhone. When farther away I barely get 1-3 Mbps on the 7437 while I get 3 x that speed on the iPad or iPhone.

I spent one hour chatting with Dell and the person changed settings on the Intel 7260 network card and updated drivers with no change.

I'm more than willing o upgrade the wifi card if need since I could not find another laptop that really met my needs like this one.

Any tips, advice, suggestions? Should I have Dell change out the card? Should I just return it?

 

Has anybody tried installing a 240GB Intel 520 series SSD into a 7537?

I just received one of these and I'm trying to decide if I should even bother to replace the Dell's HDD or just install the SSD into my desktop.

 

the SSD will definitely make a difference in boot up speeds.

I used the Crucial line and been very happy with them

 

the laptop is great, but I am having an issue with Windows 8.1 update 1 when shutting it down... it restarts automatically after shutdown.

this does happen every time I've had the laptop running for a while, I shutdown, it restarts and then I shut it down again immediately and it does not restart this time.

I have disabled the windows "fast startup" feature, but this is still happening.

I have tried disconnecting the Ethernet cable before shutting it down, and it still restarts, so it's not a WOL issue (also, I have my WiFi card disabled).

tried disabling the "wake on" option on all USB ports, with no luck.

does any one have the same issue or has any idea on how to fix it?

thanks,