Dell E-series laptops face the heat this winter, show sluggish performance

Dell E6400, E6500, and XPS 1645 are showing sluggish performance

Performance with 90W charger is 9x as displayed by RealTemp

Performance with 130W charger is 13x as displayed by RealTemp

Performance while running on battery is 12x as displayed by RealTemp

The E6400 and E6500-series laptops from Dell it seems are down with fever this winter. Scores of owners of these machines have reported that their systems seem to die down after a while of exhaustive usage. The machines overheat and begin to throttle down to 75% and then to 35% of their peak performance. Once at 35%, the machine gets really sluggish. In many cases, it is triggered just by playing a video or performing some CPU intensive task. The caps lock, wireless switch, and all other functions become unresponsive and the only option is to reboot the machine.  Even after cooling down the systems, they don’t go over 50% of maximum clock speed.

This problem is being referred to as ‘Throttlegate’ in many of the forums where users have reported similar incidents with their E series laptops.  

This issue has been reported to Dell from as early as start of 2009 but Dell doesn’t seem to bother. It even banned some of the posts regarding this problem from its forums including one from a user named Tinkerdude who explained and diagnosed the throttling problem in incredible detail. He covered it all in a 59 page PDF file titled "Performance loss during normal operation in a Dell Latitude E6500 laptop due to processor and bus clock throttling."

Similar problem has been experienced on the Dell XPS 1645 as reported by some users on certain forums. Users have complained that the system losses performance when it is connected to the 90Watt AC adapter which is shipped alongside the system. The system works fine when running on battery but as soon as the system is connected to the 90W adapter the performance falls down drastically. Forum members say that the problem is rectified when the users use a 130Watt charger instead of the 90W charger. Some forum posters have claimed that they have got a 130Watt charger free of cost from Dell. The authenticity of these reports can not be confirmed since I have not been able to lay my hands on the E-series of the XPS 1645 notebook.

As of now there's no official fix provided by Dell, leaving many users in a sad situation. I hope Dell recalls all the affected E series laptops as a goodwill gesture so as to maintain its creditability and faith in its customers.