Lemon Fresh

My computer cost more than one of these

The trick to big brand Tech Support is aggressiveness and independent research. After two weeks of fruitless software debugging, I've finally figured out the most likely culprit for the performance problems I've been having with my $3000 gimp-bot. The problem is HEAT! Yes, one of the fundamental aspects of matter and energy.

Most new laptops have rather complicated thermal regulation systems. Sensors track the temperatures of individual components, fan speed and efficiency, battery power, etc. and the system adjusts to compensate for high heat. That means throttling up the fans most of the time, but when one of the core processors really starts cranking above red line, the system actually slows performace to keep the chips from burning out. That means slow access speeds and low fps. That's essentially what's happening here. The clue that tipped me off? When you press Function+Z on a Dell, it resets the thermal sensors and recalculates performance requirements. If I were to do that during a lagging session of City of Heroes, guess what? Zoom! 50 fps! After a few seconds it dips back down to 5, of course, but at least now we know the guilty party.

So how to fix it? First I cleaned the fan exhausts and blew some dust out of the case. (Dell laptops have horrible flow-through by the way.) This helped a little, but the problem kicked up again after about ten minutes of strenuous play. That's unacceptable for a machine of this caliber. So it's back to the phone and an hour with "Peter" (who is not in India, we swear). In Dell's defense, they were very good about listening to my complaint and didn't argue with me about it being a hardware issue. By now I have a fairly large case file encompassing most of their troubleshooting script, so it wasn't hard to convince them. By Thursday my machine should be on its way to a service depot to have the heat sink and motherboard replaced.

Here's what I'm worried about: According to various posts on the Dell forums, this is not an isolated problem. Some have suggested that there may be a serious design flaw in the current XPS Gen 1 loadout. The original models were built with one brand of Intel board, Northwood, and they have since switched to another, Prescott. It is possible that one of them has different thermal requirements and is throwing off the rest of the system, at least in some units. So if the problem is endemic to the hardware and they replace the problem parts with identically flawed parts, anyone with this issue is screwed.

So after off-loading my most secret and personal files to my old machine, I'll be sending this puppy to obedience school for a week or two. Wish her luck.