The Dell Latitude XT is a tablet PC that was released at the end of 2007. When closed or first opened, it looks like a fairly typical laptop albeit a relatively small one. However, the screen can rotate and fold back so that it functions as more of a tablet when you want it to.
Digital Archaeology: Dell Latitude XT
Dell's Latitude line was designed for business users. They tended to have more solid construction and be a little more subdued in their looks than the more consumer oriented Inspiron line. In general, they seem to be of higher quality than Inspirons, at least in terms of construction. This Latitude E6520 features:
Digital Archaeology: Dell Latitude E6520
I'm going to start posting my random computer questions here in the hopes that someone might be able to answer them. Now I am a software engineer by trade and have been building my own PCs for 20+ years. I'm not exactly a novice so whenever I ask a question here it's because I've reached the conclusion that it is computer demons at fault and am hoping that someone has a better answer because clearly that can't be right...can it?
This question involves a Dell Precision T3610 with an Intel Xeon 2697v2 (Ivy Bridge) 12-core CPU, 64 GB of DDR3-1600 ECC RAM and an nVidia Quadro K2000 video card.
When I first got this machine, it had a recent version of Linux Mint installed. It seemed to work fine. I installed BOINC on it (which I do with every computer I get my hands on) and added my typical projects - einstein@home, rosetta@home, milkyway@home and World Community Grid. After it downloaded work units and started crunching them, the computer started responding VERY sluggishly. While BOINC works a computer hard, it runs at low priority so typically it is only using what would otherwise be idle cycles and normally a computer running BOINC would still be very responsive. In addition, I noticed that the work units were progressing much more slowly than they should be. However, everything looked like it should otherwise...CPU was running at about 3GHz, BOINC tasks were using most of the CPU cycles, etc. Nothing looked out of place to indicate why it would be operating more slowly than normal.
Upon rebooting and paying closer attention, it looked like Linux was spitting out some error messages during boot that indicated corrected memory errors. I forget exactly what the errors were but when I looked it up it sounded like the problem MIGHT not be actual memory errors but a bad driver. Instead of trying to screw around with that I decided to install a fresh copy of Xubuntu (my normal linux of choice) to see what would happen. Perhaps unsurprisingly I got the same results.
Then I installed Windows 10. Windows 10 behaved basically the same way. It got very sluggish when BOINC started up its tasks. I did notice that the System task was using quite a bit of CPU (at least one full core) and also hitting the disk pretty hard. But this is so often the case with Windows that it's hard to say for sure if it is related. So CLEARLY this is a problem of bad memory, right? Well, maybe...but here is where it gets a little weird...
I discovered this "fix" quite by accident. When you install Windows 10, it defaults to putting your computer to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. Since I run BOINC I never want this to happen but I inevitably forget that setting until it happens the first time after a new install. So sure enough, I forgot to change that setting and the computer went to sleep after 30 minutes. I pressed the power button to wake it up and it woke up...but without the sluggishness it had before. Also, BOINC tasks seemed to be progressing at a more reasonable rate of speed. It seems whatever the problem was had been cured by a short nap. A fluke you say! But no...it's repeatable. If I reboot the computer, it behaves sluggishly when BOINC is running and runs much slower than it seems it should. Put it to sleep and wake it up again, and it performs normally until rebooted again. And when I say rebooted, i don't even mean power cycled...just rebooting brings the problem back.
I also ran Windows Memory Diagnostic and it found no errors.
This machine has the latest BIOS available and Windows does not show any missing drivers (and of course seemingly the same problem existed under Linux as well...not sure if a sleep and a wake-up would have fixed it there too or not). The memory is new but that doesn't eliminate the possibility of a bad stick (it has 4 16GB modules in a quad channel configuration). It just seems odd that putting the computer to sleep and waking it up solves the problem and rebooting brings it back. What could possibly cause that? Since the problem exists across multiple operating systems, surely it is a hardware issue of some sort.
Personally, I'm leaning toward a slightly more obscure solution than bad memory as I don't see how sleeping and waking could possibly fix that. Maybe a flaky memory controller on the CPU? I would think if that were the case though that I would see all kinds of stability issues but there are none, either in its "sluggish" state or in its "fixed" state. It can run for hours on end either way with no crashes or other signs of instability, all the while using nearly 100% of the CPU and GPU for BOINC tasks.
Poking around in Windows Event Viewer, I did find a whole crapload of WHEA-Logger errors that seemed to correspond to when the system was sluggish that say "A corrected hardware error has occurred. A record describing the condition is contained in the data section of this event." But the "data" section might as well be random numbers for all the use it is.
For one reason or another, I suspect that I am getting a constant stream of memory errors (that are ECC correctable so no crash) in the sluggish state and this is somehow resolved by sleeping and waking. Can correctable memory errors lead to a sluggish system? Why would sleeping and waking resolve this sort of problem?
Like I said, it's computer demons...
I guess by process of elimination I could try swapping out the memory and then the CPU, I just don't know if I have appropriate spares lying around at the moment. And it's not like this is my primary computer...it's just a toy to play with so as long as sleeping and waking it resolves the issue, then that's what I'll do. It just seems so weird.
The Latitude line has traditionally been Dell's business line of laptops with the Inspiron line targeted towards the home market. Though they are cosmetically different, they often share a lot of the same hardware internally. The Latitude E5500, or at least this one, features a Core 2 Duo T7250 CPU @ 2 GHz and Intel Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics. Hightlights include:
Digital Archaeology: Dell Latitude E5500
The Dell Latitude D610 is a Pentium M based laptop that was a slight upgrade to the D600. While looking nearly identical, there are enough internal physical differences to make swapping parts like the motherboard, LCD, Keyboard, etc. between the two impractical.
Digital Archaeology: Dell Latitude D610
The Dell Latitude D531 is an AMD based laptop. The Latitude was Dell's business line of computers. Recently, they've changed their naming schemes to be much more generic as if to obfuscate things. The vast majority, even at this time, were Intel based. However, the D531 was released as a budget model.
Digital Archaeology: Dell Latitude D531
The Dell Latitude D430 is meant to be an ultraportable. Even by today's standards, it is still pretty small for a laptop. In terms of depth and width, you can't really get much smaller and still have a full size keyboard and trackpad. I suppose that modern ultraportables have gotten a bit thinner but not that much.
Digital Archaeology: Dell Latitude D430
The Inspiron line has long been Dell's main consumer laptop models (well, until very recently when they for some reason started naming all their machines very generically). The Inspiron E1705 was released in the 2005 timeframe. It is for all practical purposes identical to the Inspiron 9400. They just had different default configuration options and were targeted at different markets. It is also substantially the same as the M90 and XPS models of the same time period, again, with different default configuration options. I made a post about the 9400 a while back and a lot of this will sound the same because they are basically the same machine with some configuration differences.
I'm not sure why what were identical models were released under two different model numbers but that seems to be the case with the Dell Inspiron 640m / Dell Inspiron E1405. According to ChatGPT, this was related to a transition in Dell naming conventions (sound familiar?). The 640m designation is the older naming scheme whereas the E1405 naming scheme is newer. The 'E' supposedly stands for 'Entertainment' but without a dedicated graphics chip, I guess that was meant to refer to using it for DVD playback or something. It does have a row of media control buttons on the front that were common at the time. I have the model labeled as E1405 and it's config includes:
The Inspiron 6000 was a low to medium-end laptop from Dell. Like many models, it had a variety of configurations. When this model first came to market, it wasn't the greatest value for the money. However, later configurations were better values. Mine has the following configuration:
This is a slimiline system that doesn't have a whole lot of upgrade potential but I decided to go ahead and upgrade the CPU. the original CPU in this system was the Pentium Dual Core E2200.
This particular artifact was brought to me in the hope that I could make it operational once more. Even though at the time it was barely old enough to be considered “retro”, much less something worthy of archaeological consideration, there is something satisfying about reviving an old piece of hardware. In this particular case, the problem ended up being a dead LCD. Whatever other problems Dell’s may have, availability of service manuals and parts is not one of them. The screen was easy to obtain on eBay for not very much money and the manuals are available for free online from Dell. The repair was not very difficult and after the screen was replaced, it worked like a charm.
The Dell C600 has the following basic stats:
When I first obtained it, it had a 750 MHz processor, either 128 or 256 MB of RAM and Windows 2000 installed. Never content to leave these things as they are I immediately set off to see how far I could upgrade it. It turned out that there a couple of basic but fairly significant upgrades that could be done. First, the RAM was upgradeable to 512 MB so I immediately sought out the necessary RAM and did the replacement. The RAM was easily accessible so this was a 5 minute job.
Secondly, the CPU was upgradeable to 1 GHz. This was a fairly significant speed bump so I went ahead and performed this upgrade also. Changing out the CPU is a little harder since you have to do some fairly significant disassembly in order to get to the CPU. However, as mentioned earlier, Dell technical manuals are readily available and it isn’t a very difficult job as long as you know in what order to take things apart and put them back together again.
The hard drive is only 20 GB and it could probably be upgraded to something larger and maybe even a little faster but I haven’t found it necessary for my purposes. Maybe if and when I decide to install Linux.
Neither upgrade presented a problem and the only extra step I had to do was to make sure that the BIOS was upgraded to the latest and greatest before installing the new CPU. This machine was already pretty old when I did the upgrades (about ten years ago) so the parts were cheap and they made for a significant speed increase. It has had a couple of different Windows versions on it but is currently running Windows XP. Post upgrade, here is what CPU-Z says about this machine:
So what do I use it for? Briefly, it served as a hard drive emulator for a Commodore 64 and still may go back to performing that duty eventually. I also used it for a while as a spare laptop to surf the net and do other basic internet stuff with (I added a Wireless-G card to one of the cardbus slots for this purpose). This was before web browsing became virtually impossible with such a low spec machine. Currently, I use it for IP phone service via Magic Jack since it is inconvenient to plug the Magic Jack device directly into my router and the Wi-Fi adapter I was using for it was a piece of junk that never worked right. Also, as with all old machines I come across that it is technically feasible on, I decided to see what it could do on BOINC, crunching seti@home and einstein@home work units in this case. I’m sure it helps to bring in a Gridcoin or two on occasion :). Check out its progress here.
