Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Has anyone had any problems with resuming from sleep when running BIOS A08? I put off updating from A06 immediately following release because Dell's site was refusing to make the file available. Last weekend I finally got round to grabbing the file and updating. Since then I have a problem with resuming from sleep. The machine powers up, but the display is blank and gets no further. The only option is a hard power down and that gets my RAID cache in a tizzy when I cold boot. Since the install, when I finish for the night I close the lid, which sends the machine to sleep as normal. Now each morning I find the machine is powered up, but with a blank display. It's like it has woken to go from light sleep to a deeper state of suspension but got stuck along the way and is just spinning its wheels.

I couldn't overcome the problem by fiddling about so today I wiped my system partition and reinstalled Window 8 from scratch. Unfortunately the problem is not resolved. Is A08 a lemon? If it makes any difference I have the IPS display and I'm running drivers direct from nVidia rather than Dell's copies. Before installing the drivers I didn't even have the option of sleep mode. Now I have sleep, but a broken resume. Anybody know a solution?

 

I had this happen on an M6500. When the screen would not come on, I would hit the sleep key to put the machine back into sleep and then wake up again and the screen would work. Not ideal, but maybe a work around if it works. I am on A08 on the M6700 but do not use sleep much at all. The one or two times, it seemed to work.

 

Just wanted to report that I use sleep at least twice a day and haven't had any problems with A08. Windows 8, NVIDIA card (with drivers from their site), but no IPS display.

 

If I install two Intel 520 Sata III SSD drives in Raid 0 on a M6700, will TRIM work?

I know that it does work on the latest desktop motherboards with Intel series 7 chipsets.

Thanks,

Antonio

 

Wow, cool! Good to know that it works for some. Gives me hope that it might not be that bad.

Thanks for your input!

 

Thanks for the reply. I seem to have fixed it, but I'm not 100% which of my changes got me straightened out. It looks like the reinstall of Windows might have been unnecessary, but I went as far as wiping my entire mSATA as the IRST cache partitoin seemed to be screwed. I could enable and disable acceleration, but it was impossible to release the cache partition for normal data use. It seemed pretty borked so I wiped the whole drive and all partitions.

Anyway, in case this helps anyone in the future the fixes, one of which was hopefully the solution were....

1. Remove all passwords from both drives and the BIOS.
2. Disabled the fingerprint scanner, which without proper Win 8 drivers was listed in Device Manager as a problem device.
3. Despite setting up Windows in RAID mode I had not installed RAID drivers as I had not been prompted to. But as a possible remedy for my woes I installed the latest IATA drivers and IRST software.

One thing about the install of A08 - I had read advice in this thread to disable IRST caching before the upgrade and I intended to, but I forgot to do so. I think it might be very wise to follow that advice in future BIOS upgrades.

 

I also had issues related to the SRT caching when I upgraded from BIOS A01 to A02 so I've made sure to disable it on every upgrade since then. Losing the cache data is a drag but it's better than random issues popping up afterwards. Maybe that was related...

 

Yes, it will work. Have tried it here with a pair of 180gb 520s

 

Hi Bokeh,

Do you mean that the TRIM will work?

How did you confirm it?


What kind of read and write speeds do you achieve?

If true, that alone may sway me to upgrading from my M6500 and accept the shorter screen.

Thanks,

Antonio

 

Hi. I am still playing around with my new M6700 Covet. Today I hit F12 and was looking around. I pressed on the "Intel Management Engine Bios Extension." Had no idea what it was and hit escape to get out. On reboot, computer would not boot. It was now in UEFI mode. I figured out how to change it back to legacy under F12. Just curious if going to the option (intel management) would do that or did I hit something else somewhere? Also, in the future, if I decide to go to Win 8 with UEFI, do you change this by hitting F12 or in the Bios? I am thinking of using two drives, one for Win 7 and one for Win 8.

thanks,

mike