Why it is worth reconsidering buying a Dell laptop.

I am suggesting the readers to avoid buying a Dell laptop and consider buying something else instead.

1. Body

  1. I have been a faithful Dell user for more than 10 years.
  2. Dell laptops just seemed to me a good balance of features, prices, and reliability.
  3. My most recent purchase, Dell Precision 7740, on the contrary, did not exceed my expectations.
  4. Moreover, it is on the RedHat Certified Hardware list.
  5. In this piece of writing I would like to specify exactly why I would not consider buying a Dell again.

1.1. Why it is still worth buying Dell 7740.

  1. It has a track-point, which is great if you like track-points.
  2. It has 4 NVME slots, and can fit a lot of RAM.
  3. It has a discrete GPU, which is quite nice.
  4. If you can find a good chassis, it can have a 4k display, and an LTE modem.

In short, its hardware characteristics are very good for its time.

1.2. Why it is not worth buying a Dell 7740.

  1. Most chassis sold do not allow installing either and LTE modem or a 4K screen. In other words, there is no single 7740, what you can and cannot install depends on the actual serial number of the chassis you buy.
  2. The battery is used for powering the laptop EVEN WHEN PLUGGED IN. I do not know who could have ever come up with such a hideous design decision, but it is true. When your battery dies (which happens to all of theme due to old age) – he CPU will be down-clocked to the lowers frequency, EVEN WHEN THE LAPTOP IS PLUGGED IN. Before buying a 7740 I could not have even imagined such a hideous design decision. All my previous laptops still work and are used as a IoT servers, because they are quiet yet much more powerful than tiny ARM boxes.
  3. You cannot switch a battery so a smaller size. Dell 7740 can be shipped with either a longer battery, which makes the laptop last longer, but covers a SATA connector, or a shorter battery, which has a shorter single-charge time, but allows installing a SATA drive. In theory. In practice IT DOES NOT WORK. That is, if you install the smaller battery, THE GPU WILL BE UNDERPOWERED. I am not joking, it’s not just the presence of the battery inside the laptop which matters, it is THE SIZE OF THE BATTERY. However designed the power scheme of this machine was a true genius.
  4. The back-panel of the laptop is held in place by plastic hooks, which are falling off very easily. This is such a well-known issue that when I submitted my laptop to a maintenance procedure, I didn’t even argue when the technicians returned it with no hooks left and the back-panel flinging back and forth. (Clever me bought a spare back-panel in advance.)
  5. The keyboard is held in place by the screws with heads between the front panel and the motherboard. This means that you cannot replace the keyboard without disassembling the laptop completely, taking off the motherboard, and unscrewing the screws.
  6. The keyboard is connected to the mother board VIA THE TOUCHPAD. I kid you not. The flat wire from the keyboard goes into the socket on the touchpad, and the signal is somehow routed through the touchpad circuitry to the motherboard, together with its own signal. Which means that if your touchpad malfunctions, you cannot just substitute it with a USB mouse, because the keyboard will be malfunctioning too. This is pure madness.
  7. The power button is wired to a CPU interrupt, and does not power the board ON/OFF on its own. This has a hilarious side-effect of the power button not being able to turn off the laptop if the CMOS battery is dead. Yes, I am serious. Not just a healthy main battery is necessary for the laptop to function, but a healthy CMOS battery is needed too. Remember the time when you had to re-set the computer clock, because your CMOS battery got old and could not sustain the clock while the computer was off. Now things are even worse. If the CMOS battery is old, the power button does not turn off the laptop.
  8. The power button has other interesting surprises. For example, some circuitry can malfunction, and the power button won’t turn the laptop on, even if the CMOS battery is fine. The laptop has machinery to boot it without the button: you hold Ctrl+Shift+Esc for 10 seconds, and plug in the power cord. Which means that there is a way to boot the laptop without fiddling with the interrupts. Why then is the power button incapable of functioning without a CMOS battery and some circuitry fiddling?
  9. NVidia and Intel GPUs are fighting for an HDMI port. This happens because the HDMI port on the board is fake, it uses some circuitry from the DP port (LSPCON) to do some signal adjustment. This design is so broken that even Intel engineers do not understand how to implement it in their drivers. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/i915/kernel/-/work_items/4458#note_2585009

detect with LSPCON may be tricky and slow and hit timeouts and retries

1.3. Conclusion.

In the light of the aforementioned, it might be a better option to choose some other RedHat certified laptop for your computing tasks.