M4500 Long delay at boot before POST screen

Hi, I just got this new laptop and wanted to ask what is normal for the Precision M4500. When I push the power button there is a long delay and black screen before the bios and Dell logo appears. After this the system boots normally. But my friend's and my dad's laptop reach the POST screen almost immediately. I upgraded from bios a05 to a06 and the problem is still the same despite mentioning improved boot performance in the changelog. Could any Dell M4500 owner time how long it takes from pushing the power button to when the Dell logo appears prompting you to enter boot menu.

 

I mentioned this when I first got mine around six months ago and no one else seemed to have any issue with it, we were discussing it in the M4500 owners lounge after the release of BIOS V A06 and seems that anybody who timed it was getting around 20 seconds from button push to OS starting to load.

I started a topic on ideastorm about the bios, which in retrospect was probably the wrong place to do it, but it's here IdeaStorm | A decent Bios for the Precision M4500 if you want to vote it up or add your own comments.

Maybe if dell can't make a decent BIOS, they should get Phoenix to do it, it's pretty ridiculous when POSTing takes almost twice as long as an OS booting takes to complete

 

Thanks for your quick response, I flipped through the last couple of pages in the owner's lounge and everyone reports about 20-22 seconds like you said.

I timed mine with a stopwatch and got 22.3 seconds. This is quite sad boot performance since the hardware is rather top notch with my configuration being the maxed out core i7 extreme model. This seems to be the only flaw with an otherwise good computer, anyway I'm still satisfied with mine.

I'll vote on that issue on dell's website, it seems their bios is made by incompetent people. They lied in their changelog for A06 which states improved boot and POST performance and this is the reason why I flashed this BIOS revision.

 

My friend has an M4500 and he said if an improper shutdown was done, then the BIOS will do a memory test. Problem is he installed 16 GB of RAM so that took 15+ minutes. You can hit spacebar to skip the memory test.

 

Hey count yourself lucky, at least you could install the new BIOS. I and quite a few others have the problem that the BIOS update even refuses to run...

 

Yes, I heard of this problem in the owner's lounge that you and others had with the new A06. I guess Dell should really test this stuff more. On the bright side if your system functions well you are not really missing much.

I have one last question to any m4500 owner, Do you also experience a chirp like noise on your units if you drag the brightness slider up and down very fast in Windows power options. Sort of like coil whine.

Just put your laptops brightness on full and then instantly dim it to minimum. When this happens my unit emits a noise from the left hand keyboard area for a split second.

Does yours do the same by any chance? I also noticed that the brightness adjusts very suddenly in steep increments rather then smoothly like on my dad's HP laptop.

 

Well, yes, other than the glacially slow POST, and the fact that the system doesn't recognize my ExpressCard SSD drive, it works perfectly fine.

No, never had that. On the other hand, just don't do that, then. Yes, under certain lighting conditions the brightness changes can be quite abrupt. It seems there are situations when the sensor just can't mike up its mind, and keeps adjusting the brightness up and down. Doesn't happen too often, though.

 

Thank you for your response,
I do observe the same ambient light sensor behavior as you, it sometimes goes crazy which is why I don't use it and prefer to set the brightness myself.

So you don't experience an electrical noise if the brightness drops rapidly in a split second.

This does not apply if you using the ambient light sensor since it fluctuates the brightness smoothly. I thought that maybe you misunderstood what I was asking since the ambient light sensor must be turned off to test what I said in the above post. This is especially noticeable since I also run Linux and when switching power profiles the brightness shifts drastically causing a chirp like coil whine for a split second. If you tested what I said in the above post with the ambient light sensor on you will never notice anything. If so, can you please test with the ambient light sensor off if you have free time.

 

I'm glad that I hear from you all about this post issue with the m4500. I know some other precisions before and I was wondering about this 10 -15 sec 'initial time' BEFORE BIOS starts -> in my opinion there must be a hardware fault, which post cannot handle. When the BIOS takes control everything works 'normal'. The A06 BIOS cannot change this problem (installing by booting to a DOS USB-stick and execute a06.exe!). I contacted three times Dell support, five weeks my m4500 was away (new HDD, MoBo, CPU, RAM) - still the same (as a supporter mentioned, at last they didn't do nothing). I suppose there must be an issue with the FX880M (-> hibernation etc.), if you try a newer nvidia driver you will get trouble with that.
For the M4500, Dell did not a good job - I will try to give it back. Or can everybody give me a guarantee that this 'little' issue won't get bigger?

Keep on trying

dbits