Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

Have you sent this Max file to Dell and told them it's happening for many people?
Or are they just going to blame Autodesk?

Regards,
Simon

 

Yes, I've installed the control point s/w. I even installed all 3 modules (Power Manager, Display and Devices, and Connection Manager) of the DCP.
I've installed the blue-tooth software, and I see the blue-tooth icon on the task bar.
What is the "WUSB" device? Is that separate from the Bluetooth?

 

i guess i should..and especially tell them to test out Max with DirectX 10 enabled because this causes a crash in at least 5 minutes every time for me.

 

OK, good... someone else has tested this out for ludicrous_speed.
Ludicrus- let me know if you still want me to try to run this anyway.

 

I have a question about the RGBLED display for the Covet. The brightness of the lcd does not seem to be even across the whole screen. Is that to be expected? After paying all that money for the display, I want it to be perfect. My display for some reason seems to be leaking a lot of light at lower corners. You can't see the difference when using the laptop normally. However, if you are watching a DVD or something that has a dark background in a dark room, I see the two lower corners are much brighter. Is there any way to make the brightness more even?

kroton, I am running XP64 as well. The audio also seems to stutter every so often for me. I asked Dell Support about the LCD EDID error. According to the rep I talked to, it is an error with the diagnostics tool, so pretty much everyone who owns a Covet and runs the pre-boot assessment will get the error.

 

Not mine. I specifically ran the diags for kroton, and mine is coming up clean without any errors. Now, I did select the express testing that only takes about 20 minutes to complete, not the exhaustive memory test option.
Note that I ran the diags by booting off my drivers CD-ROM, because I blew away my utility partition while rebuilding my machine. Maybe my CD-ROM has a newer version of the diagnostics s/w?

 

There are 2 different bluetooth cards. One called 370 which has only bluetooth and another one called 410 which has bluetooth and wireless usb (wusb). I ordered the 370 card, but got the 410 card. The wusb driver were not available on the german dell site, but I found it on the us site.

 

smckenna, the LCD EDID error only occurs on the pre-boot assessment. I believe it is not run as part of the diagnostics GUI. I guess only people running off the utility partition will encounter this error.

 

Intoxicate, I've got good news and bad news.
The good news is that your suggestion was very accurate. I had installed the 370 BT mini-Card driver from the Dell website, but I actually have a 410 BT + UWB mini-Card installed. So.... I went looking for the 410 driver on Dell's support website, but it is not there in the Network section of the M6400 drivers page. I also looked on my Resource CD-ROM and it isn't there either!
So, I happend to notice while looking over my order confirmation email that it read "Dell Wireless 410 Bluetooth 2.1 + UWB MiniCard for Latitude E/Mobile Precision". That got me thinking that this card also gets installed in Latitude laptops, so I pretended I had a Latitude E6500 laptop, and the viola, there's the driver listed for the 410 + UWB for Vista! So I downloaded it and installed it, and I now get an entire new folder in my Device Manager called "BlueTooth Radios" with two entries: "Dell Wireless Bluetooth 410 device" and "Microsoft Bluetooth Enumerator".

However, the BAD news is that the stupid "Unknown Device" is still there. This is a total travesty! My Covet is playing me, taunting me! Sleepless nights thinking about this Unknown Device continue to haunt me! Arrrrrghhh!
Someone with a Vista 32 Covet's gotta send me some Device Manager screen shots before I shoot myself: [email protected]

 

As does my non-Covet M6400. I have to say though- it hasn't crashed since I rebuilt the OS, etc- just the weird audio stutter and video artifacts that others have reported.

Spending some more time examining the processes, etc- explorer.exe seems to pulse fairly often, and those pulses do correspond with the periodic stuttering. Unfortunately, I'm not certain how to troubleshoot that further.