M17x DPC Latency

I have been lying low until we see what comes from the customer site visits engineering is doing now. Thanks to all those who offered to be a part of that deal already. We have enough willing candidates now, but if they need more, I'll come back here and see who's interested. Bear in mind this is a highly unusual step, and can be considered as a demonstration of the urgency around the issue.
I cannot speak to timelines at this point. I would not have an opinion on a timeline. Honestly, you guys are the paying customers here, and how long is acceptable is completely up to you. I have made crystal clear the sentiment and level of anger around this issue, and they have demonstrated to me in phone calls and emails over the weekend and today how seriously they are taking the issue. There is a lot of focus on the issue, and engineers are working hard behind the scenes to provide a fix for you.

 

I think there's a lot to that statement. Once the dust settles a little, I am going to pick an engineer's or two brains about that.

I'd say that's up to you, but when we really have a handle on it, you will find out about it here first. If not first, shortly after John posts on Direct2Dell. We'll be coordinating the message when the time comes.

I have already been working internally on the governance piece of our messaging. Trust me, John and I have been (rightfully) kicked around enough. We are not going to say anything we are not completely comfortable with. You can bank on that.

And let me add, there are parts of our engineering effort that I just simply cannot share publicly, but I will say, FWIW, I'm completely impressed with what's going been going on the last 96 hours.

 

This level of support on the Dell side of things is leaving me comfortable with my purchase. I have warranty until 8/11/2010 and am feeling much more comfortable extending it now that I am seeing how active Dell is in solving these problems for us

 

so in that case if we have decided we had enough could you perhaps help us make a replacement/refund easier? i mean its easy for you to say we decied how long we want to wait but ultimately its still whether or not dell would let us get what we want(replacement/refund) or still get stuck with this and have to end up waiting longer which probably isnt going to make us happier.


for those who felt they have had enough could we give you our service tag and case number so you can help us forward it to the higher ups who actually know of this problem and help us get our replacement/refund?

i am sure that more than 70% of the dell techs all over the world still do not know this problem exists(im still not sure why is that) and would end up asking us to do diagnostics/reformat which would make us angrier than we already are. following that we will probably be told what some of us have been told that a fix is coming out in a WEEK and nothing else can be done.


something that would end up like this http://theoatmeal.com/comics/customer_service

 

I appreciate your attentiveness here Bill, but from what I have read, it seems that the Dell position is to not offer anything to the end user in the form of the ATI's (a band-aide at best) or a replacement (which I feel is the better option), but instead are telling us to wait. My warranty is nearly expired, I have a month left. I just came from the m1730 debacle (I went through 3 of them, all different configurations, in less than 4 months) to this. I have a laptop that doesn't work for what I bought it for (heavy multimedia/video authoring) and because of how long it is taking to get this issue resolved, I have lost my job because of it.

I used to do a lot of freelance work and ended up landing a long term gig. I needed the laptop because I worked at a variety of job sites, so a desktop was not an option. Now I have no job and a laptop that I cannot even sell because of the issues it has. I have done every tweak Dell/AW and offered here and cannot get what I paid for to work. I haven't done a lot of calling into tech support because frankly, they are not very good and like to talk in circles. I have done tier 2 support for HP and Apple, so I know my way around a computer and when the agent on the phone tells me to do this or that and I tell him I just did it, to the letter, but insists on doing it again, it is only a waste of our time. At this point I am trying to finish my Masters degree. I need a functional laptop now. What are my options? An R2 would work, I can deal with a flickering screen if the hardware works as advertised. High latency, I cannot work with...

Bill, if there is any way you can contact me, I would be greatly appreciated...or someone who isn't a robot that tells me to wait. I cannot wait any longer.

 

bill thank you for trying to cool down this heated thread but I am hoesntly tired of waiting on a fix. Having been threw the same steps and no repair and false fixes has made me given all hope up on anything here on out.

now with the bug with the new command cente has made my keyboard light blink ramdonly. Now I manage to get it fixed and now I can't get the command center to work nor can I uninstall, repair or reinstall over it. The only thing left is a fesh install has made me not even want to use my computer anymore on top of the dpc latency I am having.

 

This problem goes back to late November.

It's understandable people would be getting hot over the issue after that length of time. Wait longer is not what they want to hear.

Its sad that so much fury needed to be unleashed to get attention. I guess the previous three months of support call were ignored.

 

im sort of in the same situation as trikster except that ive bombed all my money on this laptop($7000). i keep saying this because im a student without a job and $7000 is a hell load of money to me(and i bet it is to everyone else as well).

i need the laptop to work properly for my school and also for gaming which is the reason i bought it for. i could have gone with a high end desktop and a normal laptop but seeing i spend about 8 hours in school everyday with 4 hour breaks randomly a gaming laptop seems more realistic. however ever since i got this gaming sessions create frustration instead of entertainment.

i get stutters and fps drops so frequently i spend half the time counting the time before the next fps drop to get myself into a hiding spot so that i wouldnt die.


i have also gotten this as a replacement for my m1730 which caused me more than a year of phone calls,emails and time spent for replacement parts. i had to have my mobo and gfx cards replaced about 4 times because i kept getting refurbs that overheated or just died randomly.

ive kind of had enough of this dell hell and would really love to get a full refund opposed to any replacement. unless of course its for a maxxed out alienware desktop since i AM going to get a desktop should i get a refund so it would save me the trouble of building my own.

 

Yup. I got my m17x at the very end of October and with all the issues I had at first with it, I put it into a box because dell wouldn't do anything at the time. Now I need it to work right and it STILL doesn't. This is the unacceptable part of this story.

 

I would like this.

 

I checked my order and its got "Intel Core2 Duo P8600 2.4GHz (3MB Cache, 1066MHz FSB)"

I ordered it two days after Christmas so its been 7 weeks.

 

Bill, I really appreciate you being here. But you have to understand our concern, we've been told that a fix is going to be "in one week" multiple times on the phone with tech support, and online... most cases, I don't know where this time line came from.

How can we trust this new time line for a fix? We've been lied to for so long, it's hard to trust any time line at this point.

 

You cant trust anyone. The thread of Stamatisx gives a much much more detailed analysis of what may malfuctioning on a drivers level , so much better from a dpc latency analysis only. have a look there. This thread will help you understand some things that you may fix or not. It up to the Dell engineers or should i say programmers to fix the rest.

 

I don't want ATI cards, or an R2 - all I want is for the laptop I purchased with my hard earned money to work properly. Not a lot to ask.

 

same in my case. i dont really like atis. even though their performance is better, i like physx and cuda. however if it must be, id rather have an r2 and have a working laptop than still have this r1 that cant do anything

 

i was of the same opinion until i got them.

 

i have em now but i still like my nvidias. i regret not finishing the games that absolutely required physx before having my nvidias swapped out

 

I am sorry, but I cannot process returns and replacements for you. The customer care and tech support teams would be the ones to address those concerns. I do understand your frustration, and I am doing everything I can personally to work through this with the engineers on one side, and the customers on the other. Just as I cannot jump in and troubleshoot low level BIOS log dumps and implement a fix, I can neither process system exchange and refunds for all affected customers. I wish I could do more to make you happy, but I have to stick to what I am best at, which is communicating from large groups of customers to small groups of engineers and vice versa. Using my bandwidth on roles I am not suited or trained for does not help the situation as effectively as doing what I do best.

 

but could you help us press or explain the situation? like i said. prolly 70% of dell support people do not know of this problem and do not understand it.

could you at least send a memo to everyone telling them this problem exists?

i know you cannot process replacements but can you bring the support people up to speed? its more frustrating to get someone asking you to reformat the system a 100 times over than actually having this problem.

 

look at my latency during ABSOLUTE idle (i didnt even move the mouse). this is what dell shows actually.

http://i46.tinypic.com/1grujt.jpg

the situation during resizing windows and scrolling pdf files is different.


http://i46.tinypic.com/141t91t.jpg

i cant show that with a more clear way.

 

The engineers took note of this while they were here looking at my system. So they are aware. fyi

 

what did they took note of exactly? that its perfect during idle but red spikes appear when doing those i said? i forgot to add the huge red spike when pressing stealth mode, eject, command center buttons. please quote my edited post. thanks

 

They were here for around three hours I didn't watch them the whole time. From what I saw they Hooked up another monitor so the could watch dpc latency checker and gpu z and other stuff I haven't seen before while they did all kind of thing from surfing the web watching videos listening to music they noted clock speed of the gpu during spikes. they took note of spikes during opening closing and resizing of Firefox windows they took note of the stutter during gaming. Like I said They started talking alien speak to each other and I left them to it.

 

They had also looked at someone else rig before they got here so they had some data prior to getting to my house.

 

did they say they found anything useful?

 

That I can and will do. This definitely falls under my job description. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

Make sure you send the same memo to your European support center.
I had an appalling time with them which is why I now own a Clevo rather than a Dell machine.

 

They said they found a lot of useful data that they would go over. Like I said before they seemed like they were really dedicated to getting this problem fixed asap. To me it seemed like it was a top priority for them.

 

yea please send it world wide bill. and please remind them a fix is not coming out next week and for now there is no proper fix.

 

What's amazing is that they can't duplicate this in house at Dell. Theoretically they should have access to a large number of machines they need for testing, nothing magical happened when the machines were shipped. Send some home with the techs for awhile. Of course they are a big corp so it's entirely possible that there are some inefficient "processes" that prevent that. Still, they must have had a large number of returns they could have been looking at. I get the feeling that they have been hoping this would just go away. I like many others trusted that this would be fixed and that's why I didn't return it. That trust doesn't come back easily, if at all.

As I mentioned before the issue has been handled rather poorly as demonstrated by the lack of coordinated internal and external communication and I'd rather not spend time reformating, trying new drivers, etc. I agree that it's time for a deadline with some teeth. A high level manager needs to take some ownership. Things at big corp's like Dell only happen fast when some high level manager's behind is on fire, otherwise they have our money and working on this just translates into a growing loss. Ironically at some point the present and future loss will reach a point where it would have been better to just do replacements but they are not many businessmen left at these places. They can either swap the components they need to out or they can just replace them and use the scavengable parts they can use as part replacements. Many of us would probably pay part of the difference for an upgrade. Still that's hard for a big corp to understand because they have "processes".

I remember at one point they were supposedly looking at an Intel motherboard as a replacement? Sounds like that didn't happen.

 

yea im also wondering why they cant duplicate the issue.

the tech ive spoken to says dell uses modern warfare 2 and mass effect 2 as test games which gives me the impression they will be bound to hit some stuttering some where. or do they feel the fps drop 'supposed' to happen. or maybe the systems in their place are protected by alien force shields which remove all problems?

 

Oh man, that'd be so awesome if you could do that. The number one problem here is the frustration of having to explain all this over and over every time we call tech support. In addition, every new call, the new tech goes over the same thing, reinstalling OS, reinstalling drivers, etc., wasting everybody's time.

In fact, it might be even better if you guys (Dell/Alienware) set up a special support number just for these M17x issues (both DPC and Command Center). A group that not only knows about it but also is in sync on what to say, what we should do and also has a link to customer service to deal with replacements or refunds right there.

 

This message is for Dell Bill:

First of all, let me thank you for taking the time and effort to address our concerns. I was an early adopter of the m17x at launch, and have had 2 HD replacements, and also a full computer replacement. Unfortunately the issues i have had from day one still appears.
1-Games/browsing freezes for a millisecond at random (sometimes several times duroing a one minute period).
2-Faint HD noise during those events
3-High DPC latency (yup i am on the same boat)
4-media bar sometimes fails to boot, requiring restarts and sometimes a power release)

I called dell today asking about the new solutions (drivers), possibility that the ATI cards might help alleviate the problem, etc.

They sugested i downloaded and installed the OC customization Utility 2.0 and wifi card drivers and isntalled them. When we attempted to install the os utility the system gave an error saying that my system did not met the specification requirements to run the utility.

As a result the Dell tech person sugested that i format and reinstall the OS from scratch!!! Please offer me your opinion on how to proceed. I sue this laptop for business (hence i run a mirrowed raid) abnd the idea of having to go through this is not compelling. yet, if this what must be done, ill do it... but I humbly beleive that this step is possibly unnecessary and a waste of time and effort... any thoughts?

 

If you dont have the nvidia storage driver installed it will error out. The dell download was a script to remove that driver. Mine errored out since I have been on the Win7 storage driver for my ssd so Trim works.

Do you have the nvidia one installed? Are you on win7 or vista?

 

this they also test the red spikes of touch buttons? i wouldnt say this is related to gpus clocks changing. if they didnt please please tell them..

i hope they use a driver with sli - crossfire support for those games because their drivers are really OLD.

win7 default driver supports trim whereas nvidia controller one doesnt right? i remember i had those lock ups with win7 default driver. after 5 -6 formats (according to Dell schedule ) it never locked up again even with win7 default driver.

 

I am running windows 7 64 bit. i jsut re-downlaoded the drivers from dell for the chipset (which include the amss storage), abd resintalled them, but it seems windows 7 either insist on using its drivers, or else i cant run the update for osme other reason. please help.

 

maybe if i can get the items name in system manager, then i can unintall it and use the nvidia ones.

 

On windows 7 i would not use the nvidia storage driver.. If you go into device manager. look at the screen shot below. This is what it looks like with nvidia storage drivers installed
http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/5735/devicemgr.jpg

If you dont have them installed device manager should look like this
http://img704.imageshack.us/img704/4852/controllere.jpg

That was a pic from Mandrake since I am not home to get one from my system without nvidia installed

I booted into save mode and ran driver sweeper to make sure the drivers were gone.

 

Engineering is looking at all of the problems documented in this thread. At this point, unless the system is totally unusable for anything at all, I would not go through the format/reinstall/hack that Nvidia storage driver excersize just yet. I'd ride it out in the state that it is, as long as it's somewhat workable, until they come up with the next step. I really hate that I have to say things like "if it's workable" to you guys, but that's just the reality of where we are.

 

So they only thing that they used to monitor latency is DPC latency checker? For 3 hours? If that's the case and you are interested to find out more check here
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=461247

 

Thank you for the prompt response... ill ride it out then

 

good to see you know how serious the issues are.

 

Well the Danish Dell support called me today and told me that they would install a new ATI HD 4870 next Wednesday(next week). I am a little worried about this. What if it becomes worse? Well perhaps it will be just fine...
Should I be worried about this? Anyone got experience with getting a new ATI HD 4870 card installed?

I guess the thing that is nagging me here is that I have heard that a new ATI card will not change anything about this high latency that that the latency checker detects when surfing etc.

 

I have the nvidia storage driver installed and I get the error.
No one at dell can tell me why (just to reinstall AGAIN; I am on my 15th install in the past 2 months I have had this system)

Any ideas?

D.

 

It wont resolve it 100% but from what I have seen, it has made it much better than staying with the nvidia. I just got my cards. Unfortunately i wont be able to install until Thursday or Friday since I wont have any time until then.

 

Just go to control panel, programs/features.. scroll down to nvidia and remove the drivers there. reboot in safe mode and run driver sweeper.. then when you reboot you should be fine. You can then go to device manager and you will see a coprocessor that isnt installed. Just update its driver manually and point it to the c:drive nvidia folder for the driver and you should be good. I do things manually to make sure its done to my liking. lol

 

Yes, they are so clueless. Here is what support had to say today. They said that there is no DPC Latency problem with the M17x and that all systems have high DPC latency and it's normal. They have high DPC latency spikes on their M17x with the exactly same configuration, too, but have no problems with audio or video stutter or anything. They claimed the problems come from something else. So they said they'd exchange my mainboard which they think is faulty...I had my case escalated multiple times, then a support tech suggested I was lying, then I sent him a video of me playing media with DPC checker next to it and the stutter occuring everytime I had a 60k+ latency spike. He said he and his supervisor didn't see a problem with it, even though there was noticeable audio stutter. Again, they told me they couldn't do anything without proof. So I recorded an audio file again of better quality and me playing a game (and I had bad audio and video stutter again) and mailed it to them. Finally they noticed something wrong. They told me they had the solution and they'd send me a new mainboard. I told them that won't likely fix the issue but they said it will for certain and hung up. I called again and I got another tech. The tech I'd been talking to was mysteriously "unavailable" and I explained the situation to the next one and he agreeed with me and said he doesn't understand why they don't just exchange my system to an R2 of the same value, as it would cost Dell less to replace the system than to do part replacement and pay for on-site techs, etc.. He tried to talk to his superior, but the superior said that the other one said a mainboard will fix it for sure and that there won't be a replacement (even though another tech promised me two weeks ago to wait two weeks for the fix and if it didn't fix it or didn't come on time I'd get an R2 replacement - but apparently nobody knows of this and the person I talked to back then "doesn't exist"). The tech apologized and thought it was bulldung as well and said if something like this happened to him, he'd file legal action...

At least you are honest. The rest of Dell/Alienware and tech support is not (and try to force me to reformat/reinstall hack the storage driver over and over even though I already did it and it didn't work). And of course they will now be replacing my mainboard (again!) for no good reason, too.

It's too bad nobody can tell us how exactly we are supposed to tell support to not just let us run around in circles. I want either a fix that works now, a replacement M17x-R1 that doesn't have this problem or a refund. Any stupid "wait for the fix" with them sending techs to replace parts for no apparent rhyme and reason and damaging other components in the process just doesn't cut it. Sorry.

 

But I already have a ATI, I bought my machine with a ATI pre-installed. And the issue is already much better after I installed the Bios A03. I also told the support that my situation had improved greatly since I installed the Bios A03, but that the red spikes would still be there when using my firefox browser(maximizing and minimizing the browser as well as using pdf files or open office). However I saw a huge amount of red spikes when playing some wow the other day(also told him that).

 

Sorry should have read ur sig with system makeups

Unfortunately we are stuck with these spikes right now until its all sorted out. Another card/replacement for your current ati i believe will have no effect on the dpc latency. There is another thread that shows that there are many other items that are causing the spikes down to the driver level.. I wouldnt waste my time replacing ATI for ATI unless there was indeed something wrong with the card.

 

Cool, I will give it a shot tonight.
Can't be any worse than it already is.

D.