M17x and Windows 7

So no issues with the BT installer. Which installer did you use? Are you seeing any network slow down issues?

 

The installer linked in your blog.

No network slow down that I can detect...

 

Great news. Thanks for the confirmation.

For others, the direct download link to the BT installer is:

Dell Wireless 370 Bluetooth Module
v6.2.0.9600 A01, Last Updated: 10/15/2009
ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R226750.exe

 

OK Crazy question here. I got everything working (and yes I had to remove the ethernet NVidia driver) but I can't get the touchstrip to work.... Is there a driver specific for that?

 

Alienware's OSD installer - its for the touchstrip/On-screen Display.

Alienware OSD
v2.21 A03, Last Updated: 09/18/2009
ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/app/R240771.exe

 

ok im getting pissed i had just installed windows 7 today and as soon as i installed it i updated wat i had to. checked my games they had massive fps drops.. so i checked my system seemed as if my comp wasnt reading my gtx 260 so i installed the driver/chipset from dell... and it barely helped.. i really dont know wat to do. i called tech support they didnt know crap and couldnt help me

 

When you say FPS Drops, are you talking about intermittent FPS drops? Similar to connection lag spikes or are is it reduced FPS consistently (i.e. prior to W7, 120fps+ now with W7 30 fps)?

When you say:

Which one(s)?

When you updated your display driver, did you have the 9400 enabled?

Lots of questions - but am asking so we can try to pin it down.

 

ok basically this is wat happend. i installed windows 7. everything ran fine. when i had downloaded the drivers i downloaded both chipsets bc the nvidia didnt do anything pretty much and im pretty sure it was running off the 9400. wen i play games its not consistent low fps it just drops but drops consistently if u know wat i mean like itll spike up then spike right back down. and now my firefox keeps freaking crashing on me!!

 

Yeah - I (and others I imagine) will need more info to try and assist you on this one...

1. Clean Install or Upgrade?
2. Hybrid Graphics/Integrated Graphics enabled when you installed W7?
3. Again, which chipset driver? you mentioned 'both' I am guessing you mean the NVIDIA MCP79 installer and Display Driver. If this is the case, which display driver? Was this a driver from laptopvideo2go or ??
4. Open up HWMonitor - do you see the GPUs or just the 9400?
5. After you installed the OS, what was the order in which you updated the drivers? Did you use the Dell/AW suggested order?

 

here is a tip to try. Go in your bios, and disable the Integrated and Hybrid, that will diable the 9400....Grats that you were able to even get a driver to install. Then try your games.

 

Got it installed already still nothing. I tried re-installing and I found 6 instances of the OSD-Setup.exe running that I can't kill.

Any thoughts?

 

Oh one more thing to add. I can see an "unknown" USB device in my device manager. I am guessing that this is the touchstrip?

 

guys, my sound is not "positional" like i just hear the game, theres just no direction for the sound. I can't tell if something is on the right or the left. anyone know what settings i need to fix it ?

thanks

 

Completely uninstall the OSD. Restart. Download and Run CCleaner. Scan the registry for errors, have it fix all errors. Do this again until no errors are found. Restart. Run CCleaner and scan registry for errors again. If none found, re-download and install the OSD.

 

Has anyone been able to register for their free upgrade to Windows 7 for those that bought from AW in that specific time frame?

 

Is it just me or doe the official win & drivers run alot slower than the vista 64 ones? They aslo make my startup time ungodly slow. I am on my 3rd reformat today and am going crazy. This time I am only going to install the vista 64 drivers and see how it works out.

 

let us know ;D

 

OK got it cleaned up reinstalled... Still no touch strip.... I don't get it

 

I just don't get it. I can't see how or why my experience was so different. Maybe my Vista was so bad that W7 seems incredibly fast. I don't know what's going on man. Hopefully you can sort it out soon.

Well, I didn't have it either, not until I completely shutdown the computer (not just restarted it) after everything was done. Powered on, and all was well.

 

I know its really strange. The funny thing is that I have been using Win 7RC for a month with no problems. I got my official copy from microsoft in the mail yesterday (win7 pro). I reformated this morning at around 10 and I am still mucking around with it just crazy.

 

could one of you guys on windows 7 and the sound positioning working right in games please give ur settings or smt ? ive been trying to get it right today but i dont know... it was fine on vista

 

bloody hell, window 7 is driving me nuts. WIFI went kaput after a bunch of driver installations, windows completely goes blank after I connect an external monitor (disconnecting the external HDMI monitor does not help this and a hard reset is needed)

and someone really should smack dell on the head for not releasing proper nvidia drivers for win 7

 

DUDE, I am having the same issues!!! But I have a solution. Use the vista 64 drivers, they work great. Now if only I can some how get back the 10 hours of my life I have wasted on this.

 

Win7 upgrade went just fine aside from the hiccups I posted earlier. Noticing a good performance increase in games, too

 

Well that was the problem I just reinstalled win 7 with the vista 64 drivers and everything works right. With the win 7 drivers my start up times were almost 2 min now they are back at 39 seconds Plus the os is not as buggy and zero BSOD I was having them all the time before. I have a hunch the main cause of the problems is the nvidia chip-set driver I noticed that my wifi started to drop out always after installing it as well as increased start-up times.

 

wow, vista drivers ? did u use ALL the vista drivers ? chipset included ? what about hybrid sli, how is that going ?

 

It all works great. I used all the vista drivers on dells site except for the video. For the video drivers I used the 186.82 drivers form laptopvideo2go.com What you might try is to just use the Vista chipset driver and win 7 drivers for the rest, that may work out as well.

 

i installed my vcard driver again from my resource cd now it works BUT theres a different issue... after an hr or so use of the computer firefox and IE start crashing then a bit after that my whole computer just starts to freeze up and lag like all its ram is being used and i just cant do anything i can barely even shut the comp off... i called up dell they said do a fresh install.. i really dont want to any other suggestions?

 

awesome, does hybrid sli work right ?

 

I believe so. All 3 cards show up under gpu-z and you can easily switch between integrated and discreet. I do not know If the integrated card is being used along with the discrete cards within games though.

 

Yes I did using the leaflet that came with the laptop and on the day they started taking the orders. Mine is apparently shipping

 

If I use any nVidia driver for the SATA drives it takes 5 minutes to boot and will randomly go 100% disk usage and crash. Using the ones from Microsoft Update it takes approx 30 seconds to boot and the system is stable.

nVidia have no clue how to write HDD drivers - they've been buggy for 5 years or longer

 

My findings with recent Win7 drivers are:

• nVidia latest Ethernet drivers disable the Wifi card - using older Dell ones, which may have been for Vista, I forget
• Latest Dell/Broadcom drivers for Wifi cause the card to slowly drop to 11MBit speed on any G/N network - found from this forum link to very latest Dell 1510 card and fixes issue
• Latest Ricoh chipset drivers are not the cause of any of the above
• 186.82 seems to be the latest nVidia drivers I can use in Hybrid SLI mode without the system giving me a black screen on log-on. There's a 186.9x mentioned elsewhere but that one did the same :-(

But the good news is that my 2nd HDD caddy finally arrived from Dell

 

Interesting. I'm using the nvidia hdd driver and am not getting the same issues. Though I am on RAID 0 so that may impact my results.

 

I just have a single drive, so maybe that's the problem. Although I've now got my 2nd HDD caddy so I can finally put a spare drive into it. It's smaller at 250, but I'm only going to use it for the page file and backups.

 

So... If is there any definitive list of what is needed to do a custom upgrade? What drivers / alienware utilities are required? Any special considerations... It's a little hard sifting through this thread... Thanks

 

I posted in another thread about the NVIDIA Ethernet driver. There's a property in the driver that's causing the problems. The "Device sleep on disconnect" setting needs to be disabled. Disabling that feature will solve the wifi problems many are experiencing with it.

 

I followed WAR's list to the letter using drivers from Batboy's blog. Worked out pretty well. Look back a couple pages. Batboy's blog link is in his sig.

 

wow, i dont know what to do anymore, i tried installing the vista chipset drivers and 186.82, but now lol, even when i play a song in wmp, it lags :S

 

I just looked around his blog. I didn't really see a thread of "how to" I did see the thread for win 7 drivers (thank you). Did he use the "custom" method and do a complete install (not upgrade)?

thanks.

 

could those of you with windows 7 working well please post a list of the basic drivers u used ? like gfx, chipset, sound

also include if its a vista or 7 one.

thanks

 

So...clean install vs upgrade. From reading bits and pieces from this thread it looks like it takes a WHOLE lot more work to do a clean install..?

 

An upgrade means it will use the current Vista drivers when it installs. Windows will also migrate your documents and other data over so you don't have to do that. You will need to reinstall programs, however.

I did a clean install - boot from the upgrade disk. Select Advanced Options when it comes up. Select your partition and click Format. Note that everything will be gone.

Once installed, I installed drivers in Batboy's blog in the order they are presented. Two exceptions are the Wifi driver and the touchpad driver, which WaR said works fine as they are (and I am inclined to agree). It should be pretty easy to do. If you don't feel up to it, then just do an upgrade install and go from there. I went that route once as well and everything worked just fine.

 

First of all thank you guys so much for posting how to install those NVIDIA drivers, thank you!
Got a Win7 Index Experience question, everything is good except for my ssd, it got a 5.3 out of a 7.9
Is this about right or is it not regestering the correct score, I'd think it would rate higher as its a freakin 256GB SSD
Thanks guys!

 

I did an upgrade install and the only thing I had to do was uninstall daemon tools and unplug my external hdd. It kept all my settings down to the fact that I had vista running in test mode and everything I had installed on the unit (except for daemon tools) worked perfectly fine after.

The 7 installer told me exactly what I had to do to get it to work too. (that's how I knew to unplug the external and uninstall daemon.)

I forgot this, only other thing was I had to reinstall my nvidia drivers for SLI and control panel to work. I have my 9400 disabled and I'm using 186.91 for my drivers with no issues when it comes to SLI. I dont have hybrid enabled.

 

Nice find - this definitely solves the issue, thanks.

 

my ssd got 7.3 out of 7.9 .see my specs.

where can this setting be found?

 

What should I try to get my score up?
What could be holding it up?
Thanks!

 

This didn't do anything for me. I'm still seeing all the wacky wireless issues (down to 11Mbps connection from 270 or so) with this setting disabled with any of Dell's or Windows Update's Win7 drivers.
The Vista drivers don't exhibit this issue, however.

 

In Device Manager, under Network Adapters, right click on the NVIDIA Ethernet driver, go to Properties, Advanced, then disable the one for "Device sleep on disconnect".