M17x Issues...

Hi all,

Stumbled across this website a few times and was wondering if you could help me out?

I bought an Alienware m17x and the only thing that I customized spec wise was that I put the i7 1.73ghz cpu in it.

I got it 2 days ago but only had a real chance to play around with it last night. Whilst I was copying over all my data from my old computer, I had issues whilst browsing the internet (firefox). Opening a tab would lag, scrolling would lag, anything involved in the browser would lag.

Once the copying of the files completed, the lagg became less-laggy(?) but once I launched a game (BFBC2 or Black Ops) all hell would break loose.

BFBC2 will only run on lowest of low settings with bloom turned off and on DX9 through the settings.cfg. Black ops wont even load into a game running on the lowest settings, it joins a server, then stays on the loading page for 5 minutes then hang and say kicked for inactivity.

I am getting really annoyed with this as I paid £1350 for this and its not up to expectations. The link is below to the laptop I bought. I am not sure whether its the R2 or R3:

Alienware M17x Gaming Laptop Details | Dell

I am really in need of some help. Is this a common issue with the laptop? I also read somewhere that people have been having issues with the hard drives, a DPC latency issue or hard drive failure? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks
Charlie

 

From the link you posted i can tell it's an R-2. Can you just tell us your config? (single or dual GPU? amd or nvidia? wich Vbios revision and system bios revision you have? wich driver set are you running?)

 

i7 740QM 1.73Ghz, Single 5870, 4GB RAM. The only thing I have updated driver wise is the ati driver for the graphics card. I looked at a post a few minutes ago on another website and it suggested that the sluggish-ness of the laptop could be down to Stealth? And that I should put it on Full Power Mode? Don't know what any of this means and at the moment I am at work so I don't have access to my laptop but when I get home, I will take a look at this.

EDIT: Going off-topic a bit here. Does the M17x R2 have 2 HDD slots? If so, will it void my warranty installing my own 2.5" into it?

 

Replying to question about 2 HDD slots. The answer is yes you do have them. In fact most systems (but not all) ship with two HDDs installed & pre-configured in Raid 0 (which for those of us that like a SSD & HDD not Raid setup translates into preforming a Clean install before setting everything else up). And NO - you won't void your warranty installing new HDD's, Memory , etc.

 

Thanks for this, I asked a guy from Dell through the UK live chat and he said that replacing or adding a new hard drive will void my warranty. Very confused lol.

Also to add to this topic, my slowness issue has been fixed. I took the laptop out of stealth mode and it said Full Power Mode. So I restarted and all the games were running on max with 50-60 fps.