One of our Dell Latitude E7240 exhibited strange mSATA SSD behaviour. Disk requests didn’t complete on time. This computer ran the A13 firmware. The case was eventually solved by upgrading to the A21 firmware executed from an USB stick as the mSATA SSD was unreliable at this point. Apparently, the A18 firmware corrected some mSATA […]

Read More → Strange mSATA SSD behaviour on Dell Latitude E7240

A colleague came into my office claiming the camera in his Dell Latitude E5540 didn’t work. Here’s a link to the Dell Latitude E5540 Owner’s Manual. After a bit of troubleshooting, I removed the display bezel. Lo and behold, the camera connector was halfway out of its socket. Once I pressed the connector into place, […]

Read More → Loose camera connector in Dell Latitude E5540

Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 fails to notify Windows 7 when the SSID changes. The result is that the wireless interface retains the previous and possibly invalid IP addresses and other settings. The latest driver, A11, only a few days old, isn’t helpful at all. I usually avoid installing Intel’s own utility for managing wireless […]

Read More → Dell Latitude E7240 and Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260

A Dell Latitude E6430 had Windows 7 reinstalled this August, and the firmware was upgraded along to revision A15. Somehow the firmware setting for Optimus video got disabled and I regrettably missed the change. Today, while upgrading the firmware to revision A16, I spotted the disabled Optimus video setting. Thus, I enabled the setting, and […]

Read More → Dell Latitude E6430 and the firmware setting for Optimus video

Update 2015-01-05: I was more or less forced to adopt VT, UTF-8, KMS, and DRM2 when I upgraded my laptop from stable/9 to stable/10 in the time between Christmas of 2014 and New Year of 2015. My laptop, a Dell Latitude D531 of mid-2007 design, is equipped with the AMD/ATI Radeon X1270 GPU. What an […]

Read More → FreeBSD VT aka newcons in base/head

A brand new Dell Latitude E6530 found its way to my office to be prepared for use for one of my coworkers. I was surprised to learn that the F2 key doesn’t allow you to enter the BIOS Setup. The computer simply freezes and the screen remains black. Just moments prior the firmware showed in […]

Read More → F2 key not working on your Dell Latitude E6530? Try the F12 key and select BIOS Setup instead