The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    17xR1 Graphics Card/Driver Issue

    Discussion in 'Alienware 17 and M17x' started by craven42, May 10, 2011.

  1. craven42

    craven42 Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    8
    Messages:
    12
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Hi
    I am an owner of Alienware m17x and I am experiencing frequent annoying issues with my graphics card.

    Issue 1: Occurs most frequently while I am watching movies or any kind of videos in general or while playing games. The screen will just go black and no video input will appear until laptop is restarted. I am sure that it is related to video card/driver because the sound input of a movie doesn't disappear and in fact it goes on normally.

    Issue 2: Approximatively in 1/20 times that I start my laptop when windows loads up the brightness is very low even though all the settings are maxed out as usual. Restarting computer usually doesn't help so I have to perform a power drain to fix this. Also I am not sure but apparently brightness is low only for desktop and other minor application but in-game brightness looks fine when this occurs.

    P.S. Bios up to date. Video drivers - latest version available. Windows Vista Home Premium 64x
     
    craven42, May 10, 2011
    #1
  2. Bchen06

    Bchen06 Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    80
    Messages:
    299
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    30
    You may want to try rolling back to a previous working driver.

    For the second issue, is the screen also dim during the splash screen? Can you control the brightness?
     
    Bchen06, May 10, 2011
    #2
  3. CptXabaras

    CptXabaras Overclocked, Overvolted, Liquid Cooled

    Reputations:
    1,024
    Messages:
    1,335
    Likes Received:
    236
    Trophy Points:
    81
    And you may want also to include some more details.. M17x R1, R2 or R3? wich config?

    this will help troubleshot your problem
     
    CptXabaras, May 10, 2011
    #3
  4. craven42

    craven42 Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    8
    Messages:
    12
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Yes It is dim and yea I can control the brightness while this happens but even if I max out all the brightness settings it is still darker then usual. In other words I can only make it darker.

    I have M17x R1 Graphics cards: Geforce gtx 260M and Geforce 9400. Driver versions 270.61

    I dont think that using an older driver version will help because this has been happening for a very long time with multiple versions of a driver over the course of last year.

    I also did some tests and it appears that driver stops responding most frequently during the use Adobe Flash player. I reinstalled the browser plug in multiple times and no effect. Also I am not sure if this is related but while using Chrome as a browser this happens less frequently then with Firefox.
     
    craven42, May 10, 2011
    #4
  5. Waffle

    Waffle Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    31
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    On Issue 1 - A lot of R1 owners have discovered that disabling PCI Gen 2 in the BIOS ends the screen lockups. I had your identical problem for months, and haven't had a black screen lockup one time since making that change.
     
    Waffle, May 12, 2011
    #5