BIG M4400 problem: full system lockup!

Weegie, I did not take offense to your remarks, you weren't wrong about what you said. Viper & I were simply bad-mouthing the tech's we've experienced and their ignorance towards the M4400, it had little to do with sitting around waiting for Dell to fix problems.

I've been talking to Dell for over two weeks now and we're still in the process of trying to troubleshoot the issue. A motherboard replacement is looking close in the near future. Unfortunately, it seems now my CPU/GPU is throttling under gaming. It starts with full power and smooth rendering and can't seem to render 800x600 @ all min settings higher than 20FPS on games after a few minutes. I guess I'll have to mention this to Dell now as well.

 

Hey RAM.....throttling issue is supposedly caused by the ControlPoint system manager. Don't know if you have that installed or not, but an updated version was posted on monday, version A06 with the following fixes


Update to Dell ControlPoint System Manager.

Issues Fixed-
===============

1. Issue where Optical drive cannot be enabled after restarting system on All Day Battery Mode or Extended Battery Life mode.
2. The All Day Battery Mode status is not synced up correctly on the DCP UI.
3. Issue where using DCP custom power scheme would throttle CPU by 75%.
4. Issue with All Day Battery Mode where the state is not synced after restarting the system.

Known issues:
=====================
When ADBL is enabled, in certain situations when HDD is present in module bay and external ODD attached, the HDD will also get powered down on transitioning to battery. Insert AC to reenable

NOTE: This is the initial release of Dell ControlPoint System Manager (Power Manager, Display & Devices Manager and Tablet Manager) for certain Dell notebook systems.

 

I dont even have Controlpoint installed, I never installed it.

 

I have a M4400 and I don't seem to have this problem
90% of the time I'm using Ubuntu Linux
But from time to time I get on XP 32bit to play Oblivion
I do have the gpu/cpu throttling down problem after playing for awhile, But I've read that a bois A03 or A04 almost completely fixes it and right now I have A05

 

spajix: Any problems getting Linux installed? Any driver or power management issues?

 

It works almost perfectly
You have to make sure you use something with a really new kernal
I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 beta
I had to use envy to install the Nvidia drivers
I don't mess with much power management, but the only problems I have right now is if I shut off the Wlan/Bluetooth switch, I have to reboot to get it to work again... And my camera only seems to only work with taking pictures, I don't seem to be able to record anything, or take video... But I've only tried with cheese and some voice recording app Ubuntu comes with...
But I'm really happy with Ubuntu on it...

 

While running Linux, have you tried running any long CPU-intensive jobs and observed CPU throttling problems?


Thanks.

 

Hello Guys,

I am considering to buy M4400 and I'm in stand-by because of the problems you described. I'll be working on it, pushing it to it's limits so I can't really afford any freezing or throttling down. I was curious about the progress you made with Dell customer support. I also found this regarding some new lenovo models:
www thinkwiki.org/wiki/System_randomly_freezes_and_requires_hard_reset
If any of you could try it and say if it cures the problem that would be very nice

Regarding the throttling problem did you check if it is not the overheating prevention?

Best Regards,
Kyusho

 

I can't seem to get that link to come up. I'll try again later. Dell support is, well .... ok. I'll let you know for sure when / if the replacement system ever arrives. (I've been waiting 2 weeks.) It's supposed to be here this week.

 

Sorry, I can't post links untill I reach 15 posts (forum policy), just copy-paste the above link and replace the space between 'www' and 'thinkwiki' with a dot.