M6400 Windows 7 x64 RC BSODs ... any ideas?

I installed win7 one more time and only installed minimal drivers, no software, then just let it run... and the BSODs still happened. Ran through the extended dell diagnostics for a few hours, too, and found nothing wrong with hardware.
installed Vista64 and it seems to be running fine, no surprise. Imaging it as-is and then I'm going to try a... *shudder* ... upgrade to windows7... and we'll see if it works that way. I'll probably try reinstalling win7 3 or 4 more times before I give up on it. I was so happy with it on my M6300, it is hard to turn back to vista at this point.

thanks for all the help.

 

What were the drivers you used? I am also not having any BSOD issues with Windows 7, I think I just installed Dell System Manager (none of the other DCP apps), Dell Video driver, Dell Touchpad driver, Intel Matrix Manager App.
I especially wouldn't touch the Dell Security part of DCP.
All 64bit versions...
I hope you can resolve this, really worth it

 

I installed the 179.50 nvidia driver (rather than the one windows update wants to install because people said they had good luck with the 179.50)
...also the ricoh drivers from dell
...the intel chipset drivers from dell
...the dell 410 bluetooth drivers
...the controlpoint security drivers
...the dell verizon evdo driver/software
...intel storage matrix drivers from dell
...dell jog shuttle drivers
...basically all the stuff that makes all the exclamation points disappear from the device manager, along with a few other things that I wanted to use. The last time I installed win7, I also installed the controlpoint security manager application which adds the fingerprint windows login. I know I had BSODs on previous installs, however, when I didn't have that installed. I hope there is a proper windows 7 biometric driver released soon for this fingerprint hardware so I can use the integrated win7 biometric stuff like I did on my M6300.
hahaha... while I was typing up this post (on a different computer), the vista>>win7 upgrade process finished. Had my first bsod within the first 2 minutes, then another one happened after I rebooted and it was just sitting there.
I'm going to try win7 install from scratch AGAIN... this time, I'll go totally minimal on the drivers and let it sit for the rest of the day to see what happens. video driver, intel storage matrix... maybe nothing else.
i think the only thing i did in the bios was turn on virtualization on the processor. getting so tired of this... i want to USE this laptop and stop setting it up.

 

Yeah minimum is the way to go.
For the video driver I used the latest Dell driver (not sure the version) that is currently out there.
I don't recall actually having to install the Intel Chipset drivers.
The Dell 410 bluetooth driver didn't work for me (did you get your bluetooth to work with a mouse?)
and I don't have evdo device so maybe you can hold off installing that just to see if it has an impact on BSOD issue?
Yeah I too bought this laptop for using it not setting up, I had too many issues (BSOD) with Vista so very happy that I can actually work with Win. 7! I even considered Macbook Pro (because of people saying it just works)... I have way too much work to do to be playing 'fix the laptop' with this stuff.
Personally I don't worry about the exclamation marks, I just disable the hardware I am not concerned about (I really don't use the fingerprint reader, bought it because it was 'only' $20 or less)

 

Are the STOP messages always the same or they keep changing ?
If they are various and appear frequently and randomly most likely it's a memory hardware problem.

I Had this kind of problem myself, whith my M6400.

A 16 hours memtest86+ session finally found problems with a faulty RAM chip. Run memtest86+overnight, let it test for at least 20 passes.

It took 16 passes to find the first error in my case.
Other memory diagnostics tools found nothing.

Since memory was replaced BSODs are definetely gone.

 

16 hours? no kidding... I'll def try that.
The BSODs are usually ntkrnlmp.exe, which covers a lot of options, but a few were other things, such as ntfs.sys and csrss.exe.
one of the recent ones had the "page fault in non-paged area" message.
they are definitely random. most of the time, they happen when the computer is just sitting there idle...or doing something totally trivial.

Thanks for the info... I'm really leaning towards a hardware problem since so many people here are having zero problems.

new fresh win7 install has just completed. we'll see how this one goes.

 

Just thought of something else... another thing that makes me thing it is a hardware problem. Any of you guys get the "so and so application has stopped working" dialog box on a regular basis? while i didn't get any bsods in vista, I did get one of these.. and I got a lot of them in win7.
often it was "windows explorer has stopped working... would you like to restart it?" type thing, but sometimes it was other random apps... firefox, etc.
I don't think I *ever* got that on my M6300 w/ win7. You guys ever see that?

 

24 passes in 19.5 hours... zero errors.
i finished the fresh install before starting memtest... only installed the nvidia drivers and the intel mobile chipset drivers... still BSOD'd
Might restore the working vista image I created and push that a bit harder... see if I can make that BSOD, then call dell and whine. see where that gets me.

 

I'm dual booting with XP pro. I had a couple bsod's with my first Windows 7 64 install. I created my partition using Acronis. I seem to recall something I read somewhere about issues with partitioning for the 7 install using other utilities. I don't remember what forum I read it on. The next time I deleted the partition and let Windows create the partition and haven't had a problem with bsod's since. I don't know if this helps but maybe you can find other info on it.

 

No, I only get that sometimes on software that doesn't work correctly with Data Execution Prevention (which I enabled for all software), and got that once on Explorer when my machine was completely busy.
It shouldn't happen that often. If you don't have any RAM lying around to test, I guess it's not worth wasting more time on this - it's most definitely a hardware issue.