Dell D520 Latitude Laptops - Anyone else experiencing performance issues?

[Darryl_Wilcox]

Hi there,

 

We have about 10 odd Dell D520 Latitude laptops that were purchased a year and a half or so ago and we appear to be having some severe performance issues with them, even very soon after reinstalling them (say a week or two). Now we also have quite a few Dell Latitude D505's in school however these still run rather smoothly without a reinstall since we bought them.

 

So as you should be able to guess we're rather confused about the difference in performance between the two machines and yet their setups are almost identical (software related) except for the drivers.

 

I was wondering, has anyone else had issues with the D520's performance? And could anyone hazard a guess as to why this might be?

[teejay]

Make sure you are on the latest bios update and make sure you have the latest Intel chipset drivers, there were a few problems with early versions of both of these.

[mavhc]

No problems here, except about 10% of the screens develop a fault with 1 or 2 horizontal lines across the middle of them, still my favourite laptop model so far.

[Darryl_Wilcox]

Well interestingly the drivers are fully up to date, but I will have to check the BIOS.

 

In terms of the screens, we also have a few with vertical lines going down them. My favourite laptop model from dell is the E5500 so far, although the styling is boring, their battery life and performance are very good.

[MatthewL]

We have had a handful but they are getting on now, must be a good 3 years old, did you buy them brand new?

 

Never been the best spec'd machine we've had to be honest.

[teejay]

Well interestingly the drivers are fully up to date, but I will have to check the BIOS.

 

In terms of the screens, we also have a few with vertical lines going down them. My favourite laptop model from dell is the E5500 so far, although the styling is boring, their battery life and performance are very good.

 

Try the intel chipset and graphics drivers off the intel website. Also, check what revision the power adaptor is, rev A01 are crap and cause problems.

[denon101]

You will not be able to install the drivers from the Intel website. Or should I say I couldn't. Would only accept drivers that I downloaded from the Dell site.

[teejay]

You will not be able to install the drivers from the Intel website. Or should I say I couldn't. Would only accept drivers that I downloaded from the Dell site.

 

You have to uninstall the Dell ones you have installed first.

[ricki]

HI

 

I have a lot of old laptops and when the hard drives start to get to the end of there days they start to run slow. Test the hard drives. Also when staff take them home and get any admin rights on they put extra programs on. Do an msconfig and remove the not needed from the startup, Check sophos is working correctly and have a look at the taskmanager and see if svchost.exe is running at large amount of cpu power. This is part of the windows update process and for some reason if all the windows updates are not on it can use up to 100% of processing power.

 

Richard