M4400, pre-installed Win7 ok, re-installed Win7 not ok...

I received my Precision M4400 with Win 7 Pro x64 pre-installed, and using it for audio recording and playing everything works great. However, since Win7x64 drivers do not exist for some of my audio devices, I decided to put in a new HD (same as the original, only larger) double-booting XPx86 and Win7x64. So I installed XP on one partition of the new HD and Win7x64 from the CD that shipped with the M4400. Big problem...

Neither XPx86 nor the re-installed Win7x64 are able to deliver anything but crackles and pops and noise only slightly resembling music. Forget about recording...

How can this be? There has to be some difference between the pre-installed Win 7 that the machine shipped with, and the re-installed Win 7 I created from the Dell CD that came with the machine. But what can it be? The HW, BIOS etc is exactly the same in both cases, all drivers are the same, updated from Dell's web page. Still the pre-installed Win 7 works great, my installation, which looks and should be identical, works not at all.

Any and all ideas welcome.
Thanks.

 

1. Check the latency. See this thread.

2. Try uninstalling the IDT driver and use whatever is included in Windows 7.

John

 

Use the powermizer switch (google) to turn off powermizer.
Install the latest IMSM driver if you need AHCI operation (maybe for external eSATA HDD's)
And, like John said, scan the latency thread for other options.
I'm happily running Cubase 4 and Ableton alongside eachother but still i get a latency spike sometimes, just sometimes.
If you don't want to have to deal with these issues i'd suggest sending it back and getting a different system. For every model you might be insterested in, look for some owners here and have them run DPC latency checker. If issues pop up there look further for another model.

 

Thanks guys.
DPC latency already checked (could have mentioned that, yes), it's all in the green both for XP and Win 7 (and XP is slightly better than W7). I tried to get AHCI working but couldn't, not even for teh W7 installation, setting the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci key still BSOD'd. MS (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976) talks of also(?) setting the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IastorV key but I haven't tried that (yet).

The M4400 is my work laptop, and it also has problems reading some SD-cards and some CDs, so maybe sending it back is an alternative...

Will look at enabling AHCI, installing newer version of IMSM (current is 8.9.2.1002, it seems), uninstalling IDT, powermizer, etc. Thanks again.

 

If you want to set it to AHCI you can simply insert the Win7 DVD, reboot, go into bios, set to AHCI, exit, it'll find the standard ahci driver on the DVD and boot. If that doesn't work you can choose to run "startup repair" with the DVD inserted after getting the BSOD. That'll surely install it. (This goes for Win7)

For XP:
Boot into XP, manually load the AHCI driver through device manager, reboot, set to ahci in BIOS, exit, use easybcd to repair the masterbootrecord and you should be fine.