Does Dell laptops have heating problems

can you change the fan settings in the bios? That's about the best thing i can think of other than making a good backup and calling dell for a refund.

Sounds like you have really done some great work looking into this. You are so right about replacing that hard drive. How hard would it have been for Dell to designed a HD access door on the bottom of the system?

I have sold a few of these system and so far non have exhibited the symptoms you are having. I always get the 3 yr warranty with the computers. If it is still under warranty, Dell has always done a great job of standing behind the systems. My wife had over heating issues with her Lat D620, and 90 days before the 3 yr warranty was up, Dell sent her a whole new, well refurbished, Lat E6400. Nice upgrade that still works well for today.

If the system is out of warranty, sounds like you have it tracked back to the hard drive. I am loving the

Seagate Momentus XT ST750LX003 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 6.0Gb/s Solid State Hybrid Drive

I put this into my four and a half yr old Lat D630, and I STILL have a great big smile on my face. :-]

When you go to replace the drive you will need to pull the heat sync and system fan. You can make sure that you have a good seal at the processor and that there is nothing clogging either the fan or airway.

A-Spice from zwiegnet.com wrote:

can you change the fan settings in the bios? That's about the best thing i can think of other than making a good backup and calling dell for a refund.

There is no fan settings in BIOS. Its worse than barebones...I wish I could apply for a refund !

Wittigpc wrote:

Sounds like you have really done some great work looking into this. You are so right about replacing that hard drive. How hard would it have been for Dell to designed a HD access door on the bottom of the system?

I have sold a few of these system and so far non have exhibited the symptoms you are having. I always get the 3 yr warranty with the computers. If it is still under warranty, Dell has always done a great job of standing behind the systems. My wife had over heating issues with her Lat D620, and 90 days before the 3 yr warranty was up, Dell sent her a whole new, well refurbished, Lat E6400. Nice upgrade that still works well for today.

If the system is out of warranty, sounds like you have it tracked back to the hard drive. I am loving the

Seagate Momentus XT ST750LX003 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 6.0Gb/s Solid State Hybrid Drive

I put this into my four and a half yr old Lat D630, and I STILL have a great big smile on my face. :-]

When you go to replace the drive you will need to pull the heat sync and system fan. You can make sure that you have a good seal at the processor and that there is nothing clogging either the fan or airway.

Thinking back at my wrong choice as a 20 year IT geek, I am quite annoyed with it.

I am currently overseas from the location I have bought it and as far as I know it doesnt have an international warranty.

I have thought about changing the HDD to a Seagate too, until I watched this video on dismantling the 15R, just to reach the HDD. Looking at the video, I also realized that it is even more bizzarre trying to change the ram or trying to reach the cooler tranferrers to the GPU. Its probably one of those use and dispose machines thought by some smartass far eastern engineer.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8wWVzSjaOk

So any bids on how to manage the Fan ? [I want to turn it on full throttle].

I tend to buy Dell almost exclusively, and have always found the consumer side of things lacking. To only to provide some guidance based on previous pain, avoid the consumer side models as they seem to be lessrigorously tested and QC'd.

delicious wrote:

I have thought about changing the HDD to a Seagate too, until I watched this video on dismantling the 15R, just to reach the HDD. Looking at the video, I also realized that it is even more bizzarre trying to change the ram or trying to reach the cooler tranferrers to the GPU. Its probably one of those use and dispose machines thought by some smartass far eastern engineer.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8wWVzSjaOk

I have to agree with eric.fournier.

But looking at this system, the latest Inspiron laptops are way harder to replace the hard drive then the one you have.

Pain in the *ss YES

But You Dont Even Have To Pull The Motherboard Or The Screen like on some of the new systems.

If you have 20 yrs of IT experience, you wont have any trouble with this one. One of the things that keeps my buying Dells I that they have the manuals for complete tare down right there on support.dell.com. Try that with a Toshiba, or Sony or

If you take your time, and follow the directions here

//support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/insN5010/en/sm/hdd.htm#wp1185396

Clean off a good sized table where you can spread out, and keep all youre your parts organized by order in which you removed them from the laptop. This has saved my bacon more then once when I go to move on to installing the next part, and see one or two screws sitting there from the last step still waiting to be installed.

You will have this back together in less then 30 Min, which is more then I can say for some of the laptops Ive pulled apart.

Can you open it up and blow any dust out? We have a few of these and haven't had this issue. Usually with laptop overheating problems, I open the bottom and blow it out with compressed air and temperatures drastically drop.

Josh.Mann wrote:

Can you open it up and blow any dust out? We have a few of these and haven't had this issue. Usually with laptop overheating problems, I open the bottom and blow it out with compressed air and temperatures drastically drop.

as shown in this video, its not very easy to open the 15R

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8wWVzSjaOk

#Josh: You have a point. It is better than Lenovo and perhaps some Acer models. I have taken apart few HPs, Fujitsu Siemens and IBMs. The point I'm making is, just to change memory, hdd or wifi card, on the conventional laptops have latches where these components can be accessed directly [budget stuff have to steal somethings !] as well as some even have latches to even clean the fans.

I do admit, if you buy cheap, the quality is cheap at some point too...

I have one of these 15r's as well and i have experienced the same exact thing. I used it on a desk on top of a Targus cooling pad, i even would position the pads fan right below the intake beneath the laptop. I had to get a mouse and keyboard because my fingers and palms would get to hot using them on the laptop. I also had it hooked up via HDMI to my monitor, making a nice little work station for myself. But as you said it overheats. I would even have it overheat and shutoff while simply browsing the internet/watching youtube or something. Playing games it would happen about every 2 hours or so. I also looked into throwing a SSD in to increase speeds and reduce heat, but WOW i watched the video a while back and, well not worth the time and frustration. I was going to "break" it and get a new one under warranty [which i thought i had] but it turns out i bought the extended 5 year complete care, however you need to pair complete care with a regular warranty of the same duration, because once the standard warranty expires, the complete care is void. Long story short, it is sitting on my bookshelf, and the craigslist fair market value seems to be $200-$300. As someone else said, Dell's consumer line products are, for the most part, garbage. I use their business line at work and for personal use [Latitude laptops, Precision Laptops, Optiplex desktops] and they are all great. The Precision laptops perform flawlessly and i have little complaints, however for the price and if it is for personal use, i would just buy a sweet asus gaming rig like my Asus G74SX.

Learned my lesson about Dells consumer line products.