A new bios update was released today for the XPS 1645 which apparently enhance sound quality. Thats the only thing listed in the release notes anyways.
I installed it on mine, but haven't noticed a difference as of yet.
http://support.dell.com/support/down...&fileid=364341
Is the sound quality better on the Dell Studio XPS 1645 than the Alienware 15x?
I am researching the Alienware 15x, with the possibility of returning the 1645 and getting the Alienware.
It seems there are clear tradeoffs. I am not really into gaming, but would prefer a laptop that has complete use of the i7 performance.
It appears that the Alienware does not have the same performance restrictions as the Alienware; however, it looks like many Alienware owners are dissatisfied with the internal laptop sound and the track pad.
I am not looking to hook external keyboards, or an external mouse, or an external speaker system up to the laptop.
I received my Studio XPS 1645 this Monday. My Specs:
-I7 820
-8G Ram
-128g SSD
-RGB Screen
-Blue-Ray
The machine runs beautifully and the screen is amazing but I am having what seems to be an incredible amount of build quality issues. I wanted to know if others have had the same issues and how they resolved them...
-The tech is coming for a second time to fix my screen. It came out of the box with a large scratch. The second screen has several dead pixels.
-Above the keyboard, in front of the screen, the batter (9-cell) doesn't fit flush
-The Sound is uneven. It is FAR louder coming out of the right side than the left. The settings in the control panel seem fine.
Dell has released A09 update for Studio XPS 1645 on 17-May-2010
The update resolves following issues:
*Features update:
1. Update Processor Power Management(PPM) from 0.60 to 0.63-1 .
2. Support 2nd source SPI ROM EN25F32(BIOS) and EN25F80(EC).
3. Update ME bin file in BIOS for 2nd source SPI ROM EN25F32(BIOS).
4. Modified flash part size to prevent BIOS crash in failsafe part for factory only.
5. Support over 230W adapter to treat as 130W(EC).
6. Update Clarksfield thermal table to V.03(EC).
7. Enhanced PPM RC code for P-state thread count.
*Issues fix:
1. Fix S4 long run failed on DC mode with BSOD 9F.
2. Paltrow freeze issue: Hang up when playing youtube HD film.
3. Fix unable to communicate with battery error under delldiag.
4. Fix ACPI_PSD error in "powercfg -energy" tool under windows.
5. Fix Micron DDR3 memory can not boot up issue.
I have an HP Pavilion dm4 that I bought last summer, but I'm not sure which model #s specifically comes after that.
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I just updated my HP BIOS and now I am not getting any sound from the speakers or through headphones, this has happened before though I admittedly cannot remember what the solution was.
today I bricked my new 1645 when I was examing the BIOS for the 1647. The BIOS release 1647_A00.exe released this month automatically begins flashing on an 1645
and does not seem to check compatibility or confirm with the user before it updates.
The BIOS is completely incompatible with the 1645 to say the least, so be very careful if you download it on to a non-1647 system.
Dell is building a new system due to this really sad event. Rip XPS 1645 - December 5th 2009.
I recently returned my 1645 after 2 months of struggling with random crashing and throttling back to Dell for a full refund.
I am in need of a new system and was considering HP Envy 15 as an alternative, but I still like the 1645 given that it performs as advertised.
I hope I am using the right part of this forum to ask this... Heres my problem: I bought new Dell studio XPS 1340 (CPU: I Core2Duo T9300, GPU: GeForce 9500M (GF 9400MG + GF 9200MGS, HDD: 320GB, 7.2k, RAM: 4GB)
and I had some troubles configuring my graphic cards in SLI mode. I read somewhere, that BIOS upgrade from A07, which I have, to A11 will help with this problem.
I downloaded A11 BIOS update, but the setup wont recognize my current BIOS. When I load into the BIOS I see, that its really rev. A07, also it has header from Dell inc.
I just got the SXPS1640 and have been playing a game that is getting a bit warm after a few hours of play then the game started loading slower.
I was doing some reading and found that you can update the bios to A07? I found the download, but wanted to make sure that the computer doesn't already have this and how to install and it too.
Studio 1555 dead after trying to update bios from A8 to A9
So today I found that Dell had an update for the current A8 BIOS on the Studio 1555 that I bought in May of 2009. Just a quick comment, I have had nothing but problems with this laptop. I got it with VISTA 64bit, which you all know sucks balls!!!! So once Win7 came out I bought a 500gb HD and Win7 Ult. 64bit, but as I said, it doesn't seem to be just one thing, its the blue tooth, or the network card, or explorer keeps crashing and restarting by itself constantly, especially yesterday. Plus I've been trying to use this laptop as a dual boot with Ubuntu and Win 7.
So I found the BIOS update today, DL it and closed everything and then started the update. Says its going trough sectors and there are 39 of them, when it got to #20 the thing just stops, everything then freezes after trying to open a new window, ctrl-alt-delete doesn't work, nothing works. So I take the battery out and then of course I go to turn it back on and its dead or bricked or what ever you want to call a $1300 piece of on my coffee table.
So after that I found that a few other people have had the same problem and some people haven't, but I have yet to find someone who has fixed it. So I brought up the ol' Dell Chat support and of course they tell me"oh my supervisor says that your hard drive and mother board are dead now".....!!!!!! I asked how that can be with something they post and let the end user install, now my computers dead, I'm supposed to wait a few days for a tech to call me a schedule an appt. to come to my home and replace the "motherboard and hard drive" according to the chat support.
First of all I am about to smash this thing with a freaking hammer, I have been with PCs forever and when I was looking to buy a laptop, my wife said, don't buy another PC, all you do is spend days and days at your desktop when something goes wrong with windows, she of course is a MAC person and has always used them, but I said "oh no hun, this new Win7 is going to be great and Dell have great laptops" Holy on a shingle I was totally wrong and I will never buy another PC, it will be Macs from now on once I get a chance to buy a new laptop or desktop. But anyway, since Dell has about the test customer service I have ever experienced, I decided to post my conversation with the person from dell....enjoy, and by the way..... DO NOT INSTALL DELL STUDIO BIOS UPDATE A8 TO A9, YOUR COMPUTER WILL DIE.....I'm only kind of lucky since the computer is less than a year old and I have 2 years of onsite service if I need it. So anyway, here is my conversatation, take it as you will, but I would be very wary with this whole thing and Dell laptops in general, Dell, your company used to be all over the news and mags. because you were made by a smart guy who liked computers and wanted to give people what they really wanted when they needed to buy a new computer. Well I can tell you that ever since Dell came about as a company, all of that flash and glitter about their company, computers and people has faded so badly, these things might as well be sold in a vending machine, you think that when you spend $1300 you will get something really good. What a crock of crap...forget you dell, this thing is being sold ASAP after it is fixed......oh yeah heres my conversation for all you other dell studio 1555 people who need help or ammo in case their crappy customer service doesn't help you.
please for the sake of all of us, if you can and are willing, please read the doc I attached to this post which is the chat log between me and the Dell support person....we are all going to need help with this at some point if a simple BIOS update that is made to run in windows kills are computers!
My laptop is Dell studio xps 16. i try to update bios from A11 to A12 and my laptop was crash during this update. and now my laptop can't boot to win. how to recovery bios of this laptop?
View 10 Replies View Relatedi have dell studio 1558 laptop. i want to update BIOS software.
so need steps in detail about updating BIOS software.
When I boot up my PC it comes to a screen expressing that the battery is critically low and the AC Adapter cannot charge properly, press F1 twice to continue.
The computer continues to boot up fine, but is running strictly off AC power. It boots up the same with or without the battery locked in. I even bought a used, but guaranteed functional battery and it had the same result.
After researching a lot online I saw a common solution is to update the Bios.   Currently my system has Bios A01, and I have tried updating to A07, A11, and even A00 without luck. When running the executable in Windows 7, just before it flashes the system with a new bios I get fail message saying operation cannot complete because AC Adapter and battery must be present and functional.
So I found a guide online to create an MS-DOS startup boot drive, along with the Bios .exe's which can be run from MS-DOS. The system booted up into MS-DOS mode fine, but I received an error running the .exe, "Cannot run in DOS mode". I also tried to run the .exe with the /forceit command afterwards with no luck.
So at this point I don't know if my laptop simply needs a BIOS update, or if I have a faulty motherboard or battery sensor.Â
Ideally I'd like a solution to upgrade the bios without a battery that works and can resolve my problem. But if we can't find a solution, I need to know what needs to be fixed so I can repair my laptop through Dell's Out of Warranty Repair service.Â
I was trying to update my old studio 1737, and updated the BIOS to A09 while doing an otherwise thorough and effective diagnostic (from Dell website). Now when the BIOS does identify my hard drive its inaccurate (intermittent ID of the HDD, showing no HDD sometime and a Samsung other times). So, laptop fails to boot, saying operating system not found. Am trying to flash BIOS using last working version on USB stick, following advice found on internet. Well out of warranty period.
View 3 Replies View Relatedany one has bin able to raise his sound quality on his dell xps m1530
View 6 Replies View RelatedSo I have been trying to optimize the sound quality of the headphone jack (I have a pair of Shure SE-420k IEMs and a small headphone amp) while trying to maintain the relatively good sound quality of the built in speakers:
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1. Â Uninstall Realtek drivers and use the basic Windows 8 drivers (this is what I'm currently doing)
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Pros: Â These drivers allow me to cleanly increase the bass with the Bass Boost (up to a 24 dB boost with whatever LPF cutoff you want) setting in the driver, so that plus a little bit of EQ for the highs in whatever music player you use (mainly Spotify and the EQualify plugin for me) plus the headphone amp yields satisfactory sound quality in my IEMs. Â This is the only way I have achieved a clean, natural sound with deep low end bass in my IEMs from this computer. Â It also gets rid of the annoying popup when you plug/unplug headphones. Â Static in the line is also reduced.
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Cons: Â The above way of EQing gets you the perfect signal but at a very low amplitude so you need a headphone amp for your earphones. Â And when you listen to music or whatever through the built in speakers, you have to go through the settings and disable the Bass Boost or it will be barely audible. Â Even if you do this, the maximum volume is about half of what it was with the Realtek drivers and in apps like Hulu and Netflix this is a real problem. Â Dolby Home Theater 4 also goes away when you uninstall Realtek but you don't really need it at this point.
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2. Â Keep the Realtek drivers and EQ the crap out of the earphones with whatever music software you use
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Pros: Â The built-in laptop speakers are loud and sound great.
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Cons:  Hiss in the line when it comes to earphones.  If you don't EQ, the $400 earphones sound like $10 earphones.  And if you do EQ: 1.  They don't sound natural, 2.  Since most EQs only go to +-12 dB, the only way to get a +24 dB bass boost without distortion is to put your bass frequencies at +12 dB and all your other frequencies at -12 dB and this just sounds weird, also many EQs don't have a 32 Hz band, 3. To sum it up you can't get satisfactory sound out of the headphone jack, 4. There's a popup whenever you plug/unplug the earphones.
Actually it happend about 2 months ago. The sound coming out of the speaker as well as the sound when I was using a headphone was just not right, barely any low frequency sound. In the beginning I can fix this by reinstalling the audio driver. Then after a week or so the same problem would occur again, and I had to reinstall the driver. After several times, reinstalling the audio driver cannot solve the problem anymore. Besides if I plug in the headphone after I muted the laptop, it should unmute automatically right? Well that does not happen and it's still muted.
View 3 Replies View RelatedDoes anyone have any idea why? Is this something affecting Dell globally or is it just UK/Europe in a mess?
I guess I could survive with just wireless G, but it seems ridiculous to be limited to that these days;
I guess I could also just order it and pick up an intel/dell Wireless N card for ~£25 and install it myself,
but again the question arises, why is it necessary? I assume some of you do have an 802.11n card of some description in your 1645/1747's have you seen any problems with it? .....
I have posted already on this forum asking for advice
What I would like to know is what you think of the £699 Studio 17 (from the link).
Does anyone have one who could tell me what the build quality is like and would you recommend it?.
anyone know hows the build quality of the Studio 14z?? Does the chassis and palm rest flex a lot?? is the palm rest really.
prone to scratches?? I know its made of plastic, and im worried that its a really cheap feeling, non durable laptop...is this the case?...
I got my Studio 17 on Friday and have fiddled with it since then loving almost everything it has to offer. On the flip side I'm deeply disappointed by the screen.
First of all the brightness is borderline acceptable. I didn't opt for the LED backlight since I assumed the brightness would be on the same level as the HP Pavilion I owned.
With this being said I urge all of you potential buyers to choose the LED backlight option other else disappointment awaits.
But the biggest dismay is the quality of the screen, it's so disastrous that I can't enjoy watching any movies on my laptop. My Pvilion has absolutely extraordinary image reproduction, the screen quality was second to none while the Dell has a screen I would expect to see on an Acer. It's pale, contrast isn't good enough and colours don't look alive and vibrant. I'm glad that I bought a Sony V4000 32 inch TV two weeks ago which is what I use as a display, and it's light years ahead of the Studio in image qualitly.
More over there is a horrendous leakage of light on the lower part of the screen making the taskbar and the blacks look pale. Lastly the viewing angle is embarassing, the screen has to be tilted in a certain angle or else the image looks terrible. My HP looks spotless from pretty much any angle and the same applies to the Sony TV as well. I'm very disappointed by this, especially when dell equip their laptops with Bluray which isn't justified on such a screen. I feel that they are making the standard screen sub par on purpose so that people are forced to opt for the more expensive options.
I and my friend had little Skype video chat.
He owns Inspiron I guess 1525 and I have Studio 1535.
We did some test and his camera quality was perfect, but min e was horrible.
It really amaze me and here are the screen shots from his and mine camera.
I'm with Vista x64 SP 2 - for some reason Vista just don't want to work with Creative Drivers and freeze my skype and camera is was lunched.This is due to some bug in SP 2, with SP 1 was compatible with Dell Drivers.
So I'm with standard Vista driver.
My friend is on Windows XP and He told me - He is with drivers from Del's web or something like it.
Is this normal?
the difference is like day and night as you wil l note.
My sister's computer inspiron 1420 got replaced with a dell studio 1555 after excessive blue screen of deaths and plagued bios problems that she keeps going thru.
I noticed on the dell studio 1555 i see sparkles stars of various colors in certain viewing angles. I remember my old dell e1705 was plagued with this problem also and was eventually replaced with another screen that no longer had those speckles.
Cause of these speckles or sparkles that i see on certain viewing angles the screen is impossible to look at in certain angles.
=I'm from Canada and I'm about ready to buy one of these laptop but I'm interested in knowing which laptop between the New Inspiron 15 and the Studio 15 has the better build quality, which one is less likely to eventually fail ? I've read a few topic concerning the Studio, seems like there's some failure here and there but it's tough to tell for the New Inspiron 15, doesn't seem like there's alot of people who have it.
But basically, is it worth spending the extra 100$ to get the Studio even though they have the exact same configuration ?
I'm university student and ntb is meant to be carried almost daily (16" is ok for me), it's mainly for multimedia oriented jobs, some programming in C and Mathematica, some photoshop or even premiere (occasionaly), A LOT of movie watching. I also want it to be futureproof and well-built.
Dell XPS 1645 meets most of my criteria, but there are few things I'm unsure about...
1) after reading a couple of reviews and many posts on this forum I'm really doubtful if RGB-LED is worth the extra money. I'm not doing colour sensitive job (however I do sometimes edit RAW images in PS), but i want things on the display to look natural, especially in FullHD movies... (and I'm occasional gamer too)
Those who had honor to work with RGB-LED: would you pay for it in my position???
And just to make sure I haven't overlooked something: biggest DISadvantages of RGB-LED are supposed to be: inaccurate colors, bigger power consumption and some heat produced;
while advantages should be: 0,4" gain in size, wider gamut and (maybe) better brightness...
Do you know any more to be added?
2) I'm also considering usual Studio 17 with Core i7 720QM (almost the same config), because it should be cooler, it has numpad and place for additional hdd (I'd buy 80GB intel ssd 34nm for system while keeping stock 500GB for data, I think it's beatiful idea), but what I DISlike about studio 17 is: dimensions, weight, speakers and design (and maybe a bit worse overal built quality).
So which one do you think is better for me?
3) how does combined e-sata/usb work? Since I have a external e-sata drive I have to plug 2 cables at the moment: USB for power and e-sata... With this 2-in-1 port do I need only 1 special cable? Or is it meant to be either/or thing??? From the placement of combined e-sata/usb on the opposite side of ntb than other USBs I'd say that 1 cable should be enough,
I am looking to get a Studio XPS 16 soon, but can't quite decide on which model to get and had a few questions...
1) What is the battery life of the 1647 (i5) compared to the 1645 (i7) assuming they have the same specs. I've read that i5's should last longer, but I really couldn't find anything comparing the two for these systems.
2) When configuring the 1645 and 1647 side-by-side with the same specs. The 1647 is about the same price as the 1645, if not more (depending on which processor selected). I thought the i5's were supposed to be less expensive than the i7's. Since they are about the same price, would it be better to go with the i7? Any reason to choose the i5 over i7?
I noticed that the Studio 15 is pretty much the same as the Studio XPS 16 minus the RGBLED screen. I really don't know which to choose and really need some guidance from some expert people. Here's what I have in mind:
Studio XPS 1645: ...
After a development version of the BIOS for the Studio XPS 1645 turned up, some people were concerned about reverting back to an older BIOS after flashing the X29 version. To solve this problem I extracted the WinPhlash utility from Dell's BIOS package and modified the settings.
Now you have several options:
- Simply backup your existing BIUOS
- Upgrade to any version you like
- Downgrade to any version you like
I compiled a package that contains the following BIOS versions:
A01, A02, A03, X29 and A05, A07, A08
This is as far as I know the order in which they were released. The X29 version was never officially released.
Just to be clear: I did not change anything to the actual BIOS files, just to the WinPhlash program settings. These are original, untouched Dell BIOS files, and the same program Dell uses to force-flash your laptop. I just changed a few settings (allowing us a choice of options).
Disclaimer:
I cannot and will not assume responibility of somehow your laptop is bricked during the flashing process. This can happen with Dells own updat packages as well. I myself have used the tool in my package, and others have too, with success. This is however no guarantee for succes.
Please also note that I do not have either a 1647 or a 1340, so I cannot test these files. The theory behind updating the BIOS is the same for all these machines, and the 1340 packages appear to use the same WinPlash64 tool.
The packages can be found here:
20100327_Dell_Studio_XPS_Bios_Tools.zip This package contains the flash tools and the crisis recovery bits.
I have put the different BIOSes in their own packages:
20100327_SXPS_1645_BIOS.zip contains the BIOS files for the 1645, including the latest A08.
20100327_SXPS_1647_BIOS.zip contains the BIOS files for the 1647, including the latest A05.
20100327_SXPS_1340_BIOS.zip contains the BIOS files for the 1340, including the latest A11. The BIOS files for the 1340 seem to be smaller (about 2Mb vs 5Mb) than the 1645/1647 files.
UPDATE: I added the A06 version to the package. Also included Andrew's crisis recovery kit (see this thread for details). I have moved the package to my own server.
UPDATE: A07 is now also included
UPDATE: A08 is now included, and added packages for 1647 and 1340.
Hi at the moment i have a dell sxps 1645 and i wold like to know about the bios because im on the A01 bios at the moment and im not experiencing any crashes or anything else apart from the throttling ;( is it worth upgrading to the A03 or A05?
View 6 Replies View RelatedFor those who don't know yet, Dell has released a new BIOS for the S-XPS 1645 machine; A06. Since Dell wasn't very clear about what this system does other than:
Quote:
1.Enhance system stability.
2.Support new graphic card.