Dell Goes Patch Crazy to Fix Its Overheating Laptops

From DailyTech: Overheating problems in mobile electronics are hardly new territory, but they're always unpleasant to say the least. Thus when news broke earlier this week that some users' Dell Latitude E6400 and E6500 (as well as select XPS notebooks) were overheating and underclocking, many were frustrated.

While Dell's initial tactics involved banning at least one vocal member of the support forum who was detailing the problem, the company also was hard at work on patches to try to fix it. The fruits of that endeavor have now been realized, with Dell pushing out a plethora of patches according to users.

The patched BIOS seem to prevent the machines from experiencing their heating issues and from underclocking the CPU down to as low as 100 MHz. They also remedy unpleasant noises coming from the Seagate hard drives installed in some units. The hard drive issue appears to be a similar problem to the one MacBook Pro owners were complaining about earlier in the year.

While the Latitude series got some TLC, the Studio XPS 1645's issues still remain unsolved. Dell is shipping users new AC power adapters if they call and complain. It now appears the Alienware m15x may be having problems as well.

For now Dell has fixed the overheating problems for most, but some are still left to deal with the issues.

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