It's my first experience with a high-end business series laptop with my new Dell Latitude e7440. But it seems I was wrong to put some expectations that sounded trivial for me and was surprised to find something else.
Useless OEM Windows Copy?
Well, the laptop comes with a Windows DVD where it doens't have a DVD drive. No problem for that, I managed to copy it as an .iso file to a bootable USB drive. But when I made a new fresh install, what does it mean there is no driver definitions at all with Windows version coming from the hardware manufacturer itself?! Even the network driver that would have been defined seamlessly if I have used my own Microsoft Windows copy, even this was not found.
The only use of that version is saving the time of the activation step but with wasting more time using another PC to download drivers, transfer them to the new one and install them!
We have a nice option, but you can't use it!
Having a space for an additional internal hard disk is a great feature that can substitute the small size of the fast SSD disk by having another large disk for data and archives. I liked that much when I discovered it, but when I tried to install my old hard disk, I was trapped by not finding the appropriate disk frame/bracket or the screws to fix it in its ready perfectly fitted place!
There's just a long official forum post discussing the issue and suggests to buy a highly priced spare part for the missing item; and even when I tried, the support in Egypt didn't reply to my email.
Security last and least
Maybe it's a minor one. Actually I was impressed by the rich configurations in the BIOS. Though I searched for an option to turn on/off disk drives to allow the use of only one and prevent the other from being read temporarily, but there is no such thing.
So, I used a workaround by putting a password on both drives. My mistake that revealed the bug is setting the same pasword fot the two disk drives to find out that I was asked to enter the password only once after booting. And that means BIOS uses just the first key trying to open all locks with it!
Was I wrong to expect much more than that from a well-known brand and a highly-priced machine?
Update - more issues:
ReplyDelete- WiFi driver on Windows plays badly with me! It connects once to my Netgear router, then causes the router to hang completely of disable its WiFi signal so that all other connected devices get disconnected.. after router restart, all get connected except the Dell that considers signal a hidden netwrok although its settings are saved and got recognized before!
- The official driver auto-detect program failed to detect the devices requiring drivers, in addition to suggesting outdated drivers to existing up-to-date working devices
http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/servicetag/2J03VZ1/drivers
- My 5-years old Lenovo ThinkPad can boot easily on legacy & UEFI modes seamlessly, while the Dell couldn't recognize a bootable usb flash driver formatted with UEFI setting, and it threw a non-meaningful message "invalid partition table" where their help suggested updating my up-to-date BIOS; although the fix was just manually changing the boot mode!
http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/SLN133635/EN