AW17 "Ranger" 2014 edition and win10 updates

checking in on the older haswell AW17 2014 edition and win10 updates, are people having issues, black screens or sound cutting out ?

I've had 2 recent issues that were similar enough and was around same time, and was after installing latest windows creative updates.

Just want to know if anyone recently having any issues, and if we could all help eachother out together.

Still love these old laptops, and I always encourage people keep using them, as the Haswell CPU's were decent for thier time and nothing really as mobile and LGA has come out in a while (though Coffee lake Mobile hits next year, after the summer)

I have a newer modified driver if anyone needs, 385.xx or such.

 

Ive been running windows 10 on a 17r1 for 6 months now and no issues at all. Aside from not liking 10 very much.

 

are you running an after maket setup, like Maxwell or Pascal GPU ?

 

I am running a zotac 1070 with modded drivers. have been since day one on this 17

 

Do you have the latest Windows update ?

What driver version are you running ? Does the latest work on your card/setup ?

Thanks for the help.

 

I dont have the latest update nor the latest driver. Im pretty sure im on 383. Something. Ive never had the slightest issue with the drivers or windows 10. Even battery boost works.

 

Thats good, I was relatively sure there were no issues involving windows 10, but unsure about drivers after the latest windows update, but your on 1-2 drivers before that.

 

Hey guys, I have an Alienware 17 2013 version, with a gtx 970m I installed one year and a half ago (and bought from mr Woodztack ), it has worked wonderfully with win 7, win 8 and now win 10. Now with the latest updates I am having some problems with the drivers: I can't install the newest one (389.69) since it says that my system is not compatible with it. Until now I never had it happen, I always used DDu before installation and modified the .inf files by myself. Now I don't really get where the problem comes from, so a little bit of help would be appreciated.

 

there are a couple of extra files you need to mod, but here use this driver for now.

http://cloud.alezka.com:8080/385.41/

I think this is last driver before the newer changes.

Oh and thank you for the mention, good to see the 970M is running nice and strong almost 2 years later

 

We did get confirmation that the Alienware 17 R1 should be compatible and have full support for the original hardware. Some creator's updates did cause some lag on some systems. But overall, in other social media websites we haven't heard much about failures or incompatibility.

 

Maybe @j95 can look into it. As this is his territory.

 

A new rep from Alienware ? Nice to meetcha.

Did you guys not offer support for Maxwell at one point too and then changed your mind somehow ?

 

I have managed to install latest NVIDIA drivers modded by myself 970m ID 05ad 1028. Latest nvidia drivers is 385.69 21.09.2017 on Windows 10. Think you got the wrong drivers.

Regards

Ant

 

Hey man, thank you for your reply. Could you please explain me which procedure you follow to mod the driver? I checked my version and should be the correct one, so I'm probably missing something in the modding procedure.

 

Dude just download the modded .inf from laptopvideo2go website. I never understood why people mod their own infs.

 

there is more then just modified .INF now after 385 BTW.

 

Well I am running 385.69 with the modified .inf I always get from Laptopvideo2go with no issues whatsoever.

 

I like to do things myself. It's not hard to do. I also would like to know what else apart from modding inf do you have to do?.

 

yeah the 385 is the last before there are some changes again.

 

I also purchased a 970 from you Woodzstack and after the Creative Update I started having issues with shutting down that I attributed to the GPU failing. Because nothing but using it in games worked in reproducing the issue. I finally ended up limiting it's power state to P1 and it stopped shutting down randomly while gaming. I accidentally forgot to limit at some point during a restart and noticed it hadn't been shutting off. I wasn't sure if it was a change in the Win 10 updates that corrected it or if I just got lucky with random shut downs. Last week, after the cumulative update KB4040724, it shut down while I had WoW running in the background (framerate locked to 8fps when alt-tabbed). So I uninstalled it and have left it at that. I currently have it limited to P1 and have continued using it without installing any further updates without incident. Drivers I currently have installed are 385.41. I tried going back to Win 8.1 with no change in it's shutting off when the whole ordeal started.

 

I personally first uninstall old drivers in safe mode using DDU and then install the new drivers. Been doing this for years and never had problems.

 

Seems odd right. I can tell you with an honest straight face, the 970M - I've never had one return yet for an RMA. I expect thier price point was low enough that maybe people just moved on, or they are, as I suspect, the least likely to fail. However - it's funny how issues always arise at same time with everyone everywhere, and then magically go away. I see this pattern like every few months.
This is why I ask people what thier current experiences are and whats going on, I might not always have the answers to fix it myself, but I try and find it and figure it out, and 75% of the time, it's NVidia drivers being the issue, or windows the next 25% with some update that uninstalls the cards or makes the fans stop working.

 

Very good practice, always uninstall using DDU during safe mode, before physical installation of new cards, anyone doesn;t know DDU google "display driver uninstaller" and it's straight forward, theres an option top right hand side says remove all graphics drivers etc.. for NVidia or whatnot.

 

Woodz.... I’m also getting the same issue after the last update... I’m having a hard time shutting down... and sometimes it doesn’t shut down and I have to force it to shut down by pressing down the power button. I hope it’s a windows problem and not a GPU issue with the updates.


Alienware 17 2014 (R5)
Intel i7 4940MX @ 4.0Ghz
GTX 980M via Woodzstack
32Gb Corsair Vengeance 1866Hz
1TB SSD + 1TB m.SATA + 512Gb SSD

 

Can you roll back the update ? Try a re-install without it ? Try using a newer driver but first uninstalling the old driver via "DDU" (google it, display driver uninstaller; run uninstall options via safe mode and admin prompt).
Try this driver : http://cloud.alezka.com:8080/385.41/

I will have one that is newer soon, just haven't modified one yet.

 

The issue I have is Windows 10 changes the volume based on what it considers to be the primary application.

I would really prefer for everything to have one baseline, I have already set communications to "Do nothing" but that hasnt seemed to fix the issue yet.

 

I've never seen this issue.. your saying you do not have a volume mixer you can bring up and manage each individually.

 

I have a volume mixer and can alter them however unlike when the communications tab was at play, the volume mixer doesnt display temporary altered values like it had on my m4600 w/ Win 10 (same license, transferred to the AW17)

This leads me to believe (just now) it may be outside of Win10 control, perhaps an audio driver reinstall is in order...

 

audio issues are MS's number 1 issue for decades so wouldn't surprise me.

 

I figured out the issue Woodz... it’s my external HDD (Seagate 5Tb 3.0). When I use my External HDD and then when I restart my laptop or shut it down, it takes forever to do both (even when I have removed the external HDD) but when I restart or shutdown the laptop and I haven’t connected the external HDD it boots and shutdowns normally.
Any ideas why?


Alienware 17 2014 (R5)
Intel i7 4940MX @ 4.0Ghz
GTX 980M via Woodzstack
32Gb Corsair Vengeance 1866Hz
1TB SSD + 1TB m.SATA + 512Gb SSD

 

something to do with the bootstrap manager or UEFI if I guessed.

 

@woodzstack Hi there, just a quick query, is it just me or what? I recently updated my Windows 10 with automatic updates, after the update, I noticed that the Nvidia driver was gone and the display adapter returned to Windows Basic adapter.
Used DDU to clean Nvidia Drivers
Downloaded 388.13
Disabled Signature Requirements from Restart
Installed 388.13 and to my surprise it installed directly with out being modded.
What's up with that?