M6600 Owners Thread

I do not have a disc in the optical drive when this constant hard drive LED blinking has gone on regardless of the actual hard drive activity. (The optical drive otherwise appears to work just fine. If I need to use it, I just enable it. If I want the constant blinking to stop, one band-aid solution I found but do not understand is disabling the optical drive in device manager.) The hard drive LED constantly blinks even when process explorer and task manager indicate that no processes whatsoever are active and when no processes are eading from or writing to the hard drive. This constant blinking does NOT happen while in BIOS setup screen, or boot set up screen (I guess generally before the OS boots.)

One Dell technician thinks I need a new optical/CD-ROM drive. Another thinks I need to flash the CD-ROM firmware and reinstall the CD-ROM drivers. Another thinks we need to track down certain corrupt Windows services/files (such as whatever is relevant to the registry value of "TimeStampInterval").

Every Prosupport tech associate I talk to gives me a different but confident attempt at analysis/solution. I usually find more help here.

A little help please?

 

It was not a band-aid solution - I was only checking to disprove theory of cause being hardware related.

And that is what I am saying. This phenomenon has to do with the fact that Windows 7 (or some program in it) is constantly accessing ODD drive and Linux isn't.

Do you have any system on which this is not so? I must say all my systems I remember had this "issue".

I think it is painfully obvious. System (for whatever reason) accesses Optical Drive frequently.
PS. And I agree with Illustrator76 - why is it such a problem for you?

 

Because they never hit Cntrl+Alt+Del , went to task manager, went to the performance tab, clicked Resource Monitor, and then checked to see what the Disk tab was doing. That blinking is Windows 7 writing log files as well as a lot of other things.

You could also check the log files.

OR, its a Dell Precision conspiracy. In Bios A03 they introduced the "Phantom HDD Blink Feature".

 

I vote for option B :laugh:

 

I disabled it by pressing up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a while booting. For some reason it also has a little '30' in the upper left corner of the windows desktop. Haven't figured that out yet.

 

It it flickers on a interval of 2-5 seconds. then it's ok. It means your hard-disk is working. Cut n paste your screen capture here. Standard windows process is ok, will see if there are any out of the ordinary processes.

 

For anyone interested here are the relevant and required parts to do the swap...

Back Cover (deeper than non-RGB, plus bracketing for interposer board toward bottom)
DP/N: 0772MN

Bezel (deeper, plus has a screw on each side at the bottom)
DP/N: 03T52W

Interposer board
DP/N: 075V7G

Video cable #1 (from interposer to motherboard)
P/N: 350409A00-09M-G

Video cable #2 (from interposer to panel)
P/N: 350409800-600-G

RGB Panel (LG Display)
P/N: LP173WF3 (SL) (B1)

Also, video cable #1 plugs into a different connector on the motherboard just behind the "standard" connector. And, motherboard DP/N is the same as non-RGB motherboard. (at least for the 2 that I compares)

Everything else (webcam + antenna boards) appear the same. If they are not, I was not able to tell upon just visual inspection and I did not want to disturb them.

 

The panel is DP/N 04259G

 

sorry I omitted that. thanks for adding. I believe I found that DP/N in a different post, but some folks were having problems finding for purchase out there, so I figured I would provide the generic P/N, which is easy to find.

( sorry for that run on sentence.. )

Also, just wanted to add that Optimus becomes disabled, or rather just not an option, with the IPS panel. This information is out there in other threads, but I did not think about it until noticing that it was suddenly missing. Missing from the BIOS as well. In short, the basic reason is that the Integrated Intel HD Graphics card simply cannot support the 10bit IPS panels.

Having said that, I still cannot believe just how much more crisp, clear, and realistic look of this panel. Sacrificing optimus is somewhat minor for me since I really only used it for the WiDi feature anyway. Guess I'll just break out the 25' HDMI cable.

 

Has anyone that has used both the IPS panel and the AUO 95% NTSC gamut panel care to give their opinion on how they stack up? I'm interested in upgrading but my touchscreen and M8900 preclude the IPS panel.