M17x and Windows 7

Awesome. Thanks a lot. I'm not going to sleep tonight until I sort this terrible stutter issue out.

 

Someone mentioned updating SLI - how does one do this?

 

What should the ver number read after doing this update? Mine reads 8664

 

I just went back to Vista64 and everything is running really smooth. The max DPC latency I've gotten is about 4000 micro seconds, whereas I'd get spikes of 60,000 micro seconds every 30 seconds or so under Win7.

Also, no BSODs or audio stuttering either!

So it's not defective hardware... it's drivers.

 

I got to play about an hour of really smooth Dragon Age last night and then the stuttering began again. Bleh.

 

what are you guys doing for chipset/hard drive drivers?

For some reason my SSD garbage collection utility lost the ability to connect with my SSD drive... not cool. Not sure what to do, how do i reset the drivers back to windows standard?

 

good question. Does windows update find the drivers automatically for 260 or 280's now? When I installed W7 it only insalled that Standart VGA. I'm just trying to find the drivers for it which fixes the annoying 59Hz issue

 

if you find any driver-trick to set at 60hz tell us. no one found anything until now.

what do you mean with garbage utility? a defragment software for the ssd like the wiper for ocz vertex? i have the same problem because the nvidia ide driver doesnt support trim. crap.. anyway you can go to device manager -> ide/ata/atapi controller-> right click nvidia nforce controller->select update driver software-> then browse my computer for driver software ->let me pick from a list of device drivers from computer-> select standard ahci controller -. reboot. then run your utility again

 

^Will do. You do the same please.

 

Looking for a new laptop and was not entirely pleased with the specs on an Asus G71. In regard to drivers, can someone please tell me if the M17x will support either Win XP Pro or Win 7 32-bit? I customized a M17x on the Dell Web site and my only choices are Home, Pro, or Ultimate, all 64-bit. Some of my software will not run on a 64-bit O/S.

 

You could always run a Virtual 32-bit OS, (like XP or W7 32-bit using free VirtualBox) inside the 64-bit OS that comes with the M17x.

Just throwing out an extra option for you if worse comes to worse.

 

Thanks I thought of that too but was kinda hoping I could go native 32-bit on the machine

 

I upgraded to Win 7 Now my computer slows to a crawl at times. I see the memnory maxed out...mostly around 97% I think it has something to do with Alien software. If I reboot things work fine until it slows again. Any thoughts?

 

Windows 7 Ultimate allows the installation of Windows XP Virtualization 32bit.

 

Try disabling as many services as you can from the Command Center, setting them to manual, and prevent them from automatic startup. Again, as many as you can or feel are unnecessary, i.e., AlienFusion and AlienFX. There is a known memory leak in the Command Center.

 

This makes me wonder...

Win7 can use Vista drivers, right? If so, I wonder if installing Vista drivers in Windows7 would work...

I'll try it tonight or tomorrow.

 

I don't see why you couldn't find drivers. Dell's site only has the 64 bit windows options for drivers, though. I'm sure you could find drivers based on components on most of their manufacturers' websites...

 

If you look in Task Manager, Process Explorer or Resource Monitor and none of the services are chewing through memory it's likely SuperFetch, the biggest piece of Microsoft ever added to Windows. It only suits casual users or office apps users. If you're a gamer, get rid of this service immediately, it will even attempt to cache large game files, and will do so each time you boot into windows.

Running a fresh install of Windows 7 Ult 64, have OSD and the other Alienware apps running. Using chipset, sound and display drivers from Dell, my DPC latency spiked once during the 10 mins of testing for 5925, next highest was in the low 3000s and the rest were below 2000 (i.e. yellow and green).

All the games I'm playing at the moment (Dragon Age, L4D, TF2) are running silky smooth.

 

Anyone using the 159.39 drivers?

 

From 2007? Check the version #.

 

Beta drivers from Nvidia's site. I transposed the numbers. 195.39 11/7/09

 

Interesting. I tried installing Vista drivers to no avail. Tried disabling superfetch and didn't seem to help either. I'm going to try doing a fresh install tonight... again. If that doesn't work, it's back to Vista for me I think

Did you install ALL drivers from Dell? Are there any you skipped? BTW, disabling internal bluetooth seemed to help the latency issue.

 

Hello. I'm running fairly well now with Windows 7. A question/concern popped in my head and I hope someone can help educate me with a couple answers.
Simple questions; I have a single GeForce 260 card. In device manager I see 9400 (8.15.11.8664) for the driver. I see people talk about "Hybrid".
How do I know I'm using the 260? Should I see a second driver....one being for integrated one for the 260 card?
Also - given I have a single card - should Hybrid be enabled or not in Bios with my single card??
Thanks!
Jimmer

 

I would disabled the 9400 (both Hybrid and Integrated from Bios) it's nothing but trouble for a lot of people.... unless you really want to squeeze an extra 15 minutes from your battery, do yourself a favor and disable it.

 

This is with win7 x64?

 

Thanks for the advice. I did that and it's working great.
Jimmer

 

What is the best way to disable the 9400? What order? Bios and then where?

 

If you disable it in the BIOS it won't come up anywhere else.

 

So what is the consensus about installing Win. 7??? Do it or is it too much of a hassle? I have limited computer knowledge and just got M17X and Vista seems fine to me and I just don't want to screw something up by installing 7. Also what is a "clean install?"

Thanks.

 

Stick with Vista. Just got done redoing my friends M17x from Win 7 x64 back to Ultimate Vista x64.

Wait awhile for Dell to perfect their crappy drivers.

 

Just to help confuse Designer23 a little more: for me, switching to Windows 7 from Vista was worth the 20 mins it took me to do it. It's the best thing I could have done for my computer since I've owned it.

 

Yes.

These are the steps I took.

Disabled Bluetooth (BIOS)
Enabled 9400M / Hybrid (BIOS)
Fresh install Windows 7
Installed Dell audio drivers
Installed Dell chipset drivers
Installed Ricoh drivers
Installed OSD
Installed Command Center
Installed Dell GPU drivers
Disabled 9400M / Hybrid (BIOS)
Disabled Wifi (Windows) - always on LAN anyways

That's it.

 

And now your system has NO issues?

 

and how was your dcp latency before doing all these? disabled bluetooth in bios? hmmm...

 

Yes, you can see my DPC graph on the previous page (had a couple of spikes in 10 mins of testing - highest was 59xx), rest are green or yellow (<2k).

Games like Dragon Age, TF2, L4D, Mass Effect all running silky smooth atm.

Also have things like SuperFetch, Windows Search and any Media Server services disabled.

 

Never checked sorry.

 

I just installed Windows 7 Professional on my M17x, and I installed all the drivers in the order presented by Batboy in his blog, except I did not update my bios from A00 to A02, and I did not install the touchpad or infared drivers. Everything is working fine, but I am interested in installing the A02 Bios update now. I just want to know if there are any performance ramifications if I install it now, versus if I had installed it in the order that Batboy had presented on his blog.

 

Man.. we have to rig our hyper expensive laptops to function somewhat like we paid for them. Dell? Hello?

 

Test your A00 bios before you make the switch. I dont know what they updated in the A02.

 

No - and if you find you are having issues with A02, just download A00 from Dell and reflash. No issues at all with flashing the BIOS out of order. The BIOS is listed there as a reference, it is not part of the recommended driver install order. The BIOS release notes can be viewed prior to flashing. See the directory which is created when you run the A02 .exe to decompress the files.

 

however, according to Dell the AO2 has some fixes like better working osd application. for people with ATI A02 is the only way anyway.

 

Thanks Batboy, I had a feeling it didnt matter, but with all of the performance issues I am seeing in regards to Windows 7 and the M17x, I just wanted to cover all of my bases.

My installation of Windows 7 is working very well, hybrid SLI works, I am not having any performance issues except for one that locks up my computer for a minute or so, and then it goes back to normal. In the event log, the error reads "Reset to Device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued." It seems to be a driver issue, something to do with Nvidia from what I have seen. However, I do not have raid, which makes it slightly weird. Has anyone else experienced this issue? It is not a frequent issue for me, and it happens to my computer randomly.

 

I don't use RAID either and find the nVidia SATA drivers to be awful - five minutes to boot instead of 30 seconds and random 100% disk thrashing which most of the time locks the machine up that I have to force it off.

I removed them and used drivers from Windows Update - not even the Dell ones would work.

 

Mine is not quite as bad, as I mentioned it happens randomly, and only locks up for a minute or so, and does not require a hard reboot. I will however try the windows drivers, as this seems to be the fix for any problematic drivers in Windows 7 currently.

 

I got rid of Raid0 this weekend. The random lockups are annoying as hell - mainly happening when I'm installing or doing something that utilizes one or both of the hdd's. Couple questions.

1. So it seems uninstalling the nvidia storage drivers would help solve the problem?

2. I have the pagefile set on the 2nd hard drive in its own small partition of 10gigs (pagefile set to 6144). Is this a bad idea? I remember back in the day people did this to get some extra performance out of their pc...

 

1. It does for me, wasn't even using RAID with just one HDD and I would get the lockups etc
2. I now have a second smaller HDD which I use for backups and I've put my pagefile on there. It was always my understanding that it still helps for it be on a separate spindle to the main OS - can't see that being different these days unless maybe with SSDs

 

I installed intel x-25m 160GB SSD today and reinstalled windows.
Now, I can't run WEI for my system anymore.
It shows this error
"The Windows Experience Index for your system could not be computed."
"Cannot complete assessment.
The assessment or other operation did not complete successfully.
This is due to an error being reported from the operating system, driver, or other component."

I have all the drivers installed and there is no error showing in device manager.
i searched on google and found somewhere that it could be because of Kaspersky. But their solution didn't fix the problem.

 

This may be one of the reason why I have not had as many issues as others (opted not to go with RAID as I use my 2nd HDD for backups (imaging using Acronis) and misc file storage). Hmmmm... In response to your Q re: page file -

Leave it alone. You have more than enough memory and the old page file thing was used back in Win2k and WinXP. Let Windows control it. I do and have never had an issue.

IMO of course.

 

Had to remove 187.66 at the weekend and back on 186.82 - had terrible stuttering in Borderlands when any character/creature came into view in single player and got worse if it was a co-op player. Totally unplayable.

All fine again now though.

 

With 186.82 do you guys get the 59Hz issue as well?