JenH

Dell's ControlPoint software just sucks in my opinion. Problem is, I'm not finding much about it in other forums or at Dell's site. They give little or no information with this software, so I thought I'd start a thread here for people to share their experiences and issues with it.

I was in the Early Adopter program and from the start, I hated ControlPoint just from the size of the download. :-)

When I finally got my production system, I let the real work begin. In my initial build, I included both System Manager and Security Manager so I could play around with the Fingerprint Reader.

Security Manager turned out to be a nightmare. It took several minutes for ControlPoint to launch because it was querying the hardware on the system. There is no indication of this, so the program appeared to "hang".

Getting the fingerprint reader activated (it wasn't enabled by default in the BIOS) was a whole other challenge.

Even after all this and getting the fingerprint reader going, the "fingerprint logon layer" caused a 45 second delay in logging in. Coming out of standby with the fingerprint reader was instant, as expected.

After all this, we decided to scrap the fingerprint reader for now and just use the System Manager.

This was a huge difference. ControlPoint loaded immediately and worked as expected.

From there, it was trying to figure out how to import our own power scheme. Dell promised this would be possible with ControlPoint, but, alas, we are still configuring the Power Scheme manually for each user profile. That totally sucks.

The other bug we have with the Power Scheme is that once it's configured and you reboot, the Power Scheme shows up BLANK in ControlPoint. However, if you check the Power Configuration through Windows, the scheme is there. We have deemed this a bug and will be working directly with Dell on it.

The last issue we're having has to do with Intel SpeedStep. When a Power Scheme is configured and the system switched to battery power, it is stuck at 191MHz and extremely slow. Plugging it in puts it back at peak speed. Unplugging drops it right back down to 191MHz.

If we do not configure a Power Scheme of our own, the issue does not occur. Removing ControlPoint did not fix the issue in either scenario.

I think that's all of it for now. Please share what you've experienced with ControlPoint. :-)

JenH

Dell released new versions of System Manager and Security Manager yesterday, but their release notes are extremely vague on what was "fixed". I will be testing these today.

Here is my latest update on the Power Scheme issue:

This seems to be related to installation method. I am copying the install files locally, then installing. I am using the ADDLOCAL switch and choosing to only install "power,display.devices". I was also using a custom .xml to turn certain features on or off by default. Taking out the .xml had no effect. Taking out ADDLOCAL did. This tells me the .msi build is flawed because doing the full install either scripted or manually, there are no issues.

I did have a conversation with some Dell engineers and they admit that the security software is having problems, but didn't get into specifics. I'm supposed to work with them this week over all the issues we are seeing with the E-Series and trying to determine if it's an image specific issue, hardware issue, driver issue, or software issue. Should be fun to figure out the cause(s).