Dell censoring its support forum to hide laptop performance issues

DailyTech reports Dell is trying to cover up performance issues with its E6400, E6500, and XPS laptop lineup. The issue is dubbed "throttlegate" because a throttling mechanism severely cuts the performance of select laptop models when the CPU heats up even just a little bit. Users affected by the issue report their laptop acts as if it is frozen because the system throttles CPU performance by 95 percent or more, after a while the CPU kicks back in, but only reaches about 50 percent of the initial clock speed.

As more and more users started complaining about the issue at Dell's support forums, some bright heads at the company decided it would be a good idea to cover up the issue by censoring user comments and banning some of the more vocal users. They should have known better though, as the issue is now out in the open.

Dell's users have been complaining about the problems on the company's support forums. In what appears to be a desperate attempt to save face, the company has begun banning troublesome complainers and deleting their posts. One prolific user that has been banned, "Tinkerdude", has actually release an extensive 59-page analysis of the problems dubbed "Performance loss during normal operation in a Dell Latitude E6500 laptop due to processor and bus clock throttling". That document can be found here (PDF).