Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

1. Not me anyway....try the uninstall/automatic reinstall as mentioned above

2. Temps seem fine

3. Just go with another BIOS if you find it annoying...get older versions here http://ftp1.us.dell.com/bios/ Versions A02 and A03 are working good on all fronts.

4. The 2CCFL screen is just a bit of a crappy screen the way it's set up in factory. See if you can borrow a monitor calibrator from someone or buy yourself a Pantone Huey Pro, the Huey would cost you about $80 and gives great results. After calibrating and the screen looks great, what brightness % are you using it at? If set to 40-50% the brighter/darker areas aren't that obvious at all.

 

Hi Boorns,

this fixed it for me, though there seems to be a LOT of different reasons and solutions for the issue across a lot of different systems.
First i disabled everything non-essential in the BIOS and DPC showed everything was working fine. Then one by one i reenabled the devices and only with the modular bay (dunno if it's the same but on the m4400 the DVD can be replaced by a 1,8" HDD connected through eSATA) the latency came back. The normal eSATA/USB port didn't give any problems and neither did the wireless card. The onboard LAN however did bring back the red spikes but that's ok cause i never use that anyway.
All is running smooth now except for those two devices and i've tested both Vista 64 and XP

So....disable modular bay in bios and your onbord LAN, restart, run dpc latency checker and my guess is you'll be fine
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Thanks for the helpful reply.

I get about 300microsecs with the onboard lan and modular bay disabled. It is pretty consistent with occasional spikes that I'm sure are caused by the wireless card.

Is this the best I can get? It seems wasteful to buy a laptop and not be able to use the DVD drive or ethernet port(I need it for heavy downloads).

 

You can always replace the 1397 with a 5100 or half size 5300 (best option).

 

I have the intel 5300 and it's not giving any problems. That said, if you need the LAN then that could be a problem, i wouldn't worry about the DVD though 'cause it's switched on again fast enough i think but i hardly use it anyway.

 

The DVD drive isn't a big deal to me. I was thinking of replacing it for a SSD down the line. I'd gladly replace the Dell wifi card also but it'd cost me money and the same old problems might occur.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try tweaking it around for another day or so, and then might call up Customer Service and ask for a return. Despite the problems with DPC and some other cooling issues, it's a great machine.

 

FWIW, in my case disabling the eSATA port fixed audio skipping for me. I also found I wasn't able to burn DVDs with it enabled but I haven't really tested that a lot yet.

Cheers,

Simon.

 

I have to add that i never really experienced actual audio skipping after i let windows find it's own drivers for the soundcard (uninstalled the IDT drivers)
It's just DPC showing me that i had a problem.

 

Ooops, I ran a DPC checker and I now see that there are still spikes every 60 seconds or so ... even with eSata disabled. With eSata enabled it's every second. So I guess I do still have a problem. Argh.

 

Well ... the saga continues - LPTP-LVR, I think I have arrived at where you are at. I re-installed the Matrix Storage Manager because I realized I might have skipped it previously and after doing that and removing the IDT audio driver I have no audio skipping but large DPC latency (around 8000). And just like you, disabling the modular bay eliminates the large DPC latency.

However one thing maybe different - I found I didn't need to disable the modular bay in BIOS - I could get the same effect by just leaving it enabled and popping the DVD drive out of the bay. I'm not sure if this is what you were doing or not, but it's a lot better than disabling it in BIOS - you can stick it back in any time you want to read a disc and pop it out again when you're done. So this is somewhat tolerable ... however -

I have yet to write a DVD that isn't corrupted. Some of them write some of the files ok and are readable but when I check the whole contents there are unreadable parts. It would make sense that high DPC latency might be causing that too ... if so, this issue is probably a show stopper to me.

I was trying to find if there is a specific driver for the DVD drive itself but there doesn't seem to be anything mentioned. Does anyone know which driver I should look for updates for that might affect the DVD drive or the modular bay?

Cheers!