M17 General Information Thread

the 4850 are the best youc an have

and they will cost you an arm and are exclusive to Alienware

 

Thanks. Will hold off for now. I noticed from your sig that you have 4850's, were you one of the lucky ones when alienware briefly sold them?

 

yup i got mines from AW when i bought the lappy

i bought almost only that a mobo a cpu 2 gpu and a 1200p screen and upgraded the rest on my own

but good luck to find them (i might try to order a set from alienware and pu them for sale) i might do enought profit to order my qx9300

 

Thanks. When I purchased my M17 I ordered the cheapest components (except for the GPUs) and upgraded slowly. I should have ordered the 1200p screen.

Do Alienware still sell the 4850's and if so any idea how much?

 

Alienware no longer sell the 4850s......thats why I paid another user of this forum £500 for my pair. Im sure another pair will turn up eventually on ebay or the marketplace but expect to pay the same as what I did.

I have a question guys.....Im able to purchase a spare battery from alienware but am unsure whether i need it or not. You see Im trying to anticipate any future problems and know that my battery is junk and does not hold any charge at all. However.....I never use my battery.....i always have my notebook plugged in.
The question I want answering is whether having a underperforming battery will affect my PC even when it is plugged in and on charge? or does it not matter when it is on charge?

Thanks.

 

it should not affect it the psu is capable of feeding the beast well enough how ever a defective batterie that does not hold it's charge might have other defect and take fire or release acid in your lappy

why did intell stoped producing the qx9300 it's price is going through the roof atm

 

because it is old school and when it was not obsolete was still a niche market item

 

so wonderfull how item for computer become old school in a mather of month LOL

the second parti knew but even then they make niche item them selfs

 

They were out for an entire year before becoming obsolete (replaced by 920xm) so they had a good run.....

And the remark about niche items was because there were probably 1000 Q9000s made for each QX9300 - they do not sell nearly as much and therefore do not need to be made in as high capacity

 

true only freaks like us buy these kind of cpu's

so any knew if you'r getting you'r m17x replaced?

if not is there any ES of the qx9300 that will not cause issue in the m17 ?

 

btw, thanks for the info granite......it was just as I thought. Although i will probably buy the spare battery just for resale value. Hard to get a good price for a notebook that only holds charge for half an hour.

Thanks pal.

 

wait a sec i think i know what your issue is window detect that my batterie is down after 30 min but if i set the laptop to go to sleep i canw ake it up and it has 1h30 of batterie life left

the batterie charge sensor the m17 batterie tends to be defective there was a thread about how to fix it some time ago but i didn't had the time to try it befor it got erased


(by does not hold it's charge i though you where talking about the lappy discharging at night if unplugged)

 

the stutter issues with the M17 are the same as the ones in the M17x....it has to do with the BIOS throttling the CPU when the power draw gets to an artificially imposed limit set in the BIOS supposedly to protect us/the laptop/the ac adapter

I think these limits being removed are what made the BIOS (.29) from zfactor so significant. The quads eat 10-15 more watts of power than the duals so get your to this limit much faster than the dual cores will (these laptops operate on a very tight power budget)

 

ya i recal somethign like that was said when Z was devlopping his .29 bios (what happened to z while we are at it we never heard of him again)


also that the m17 has only 2 power line for the cpu or something like that wich is what made the m17x less sencitive because it had 3


and that's also when i found how lucky i was cause mine is on an even tighter budget cause i have a quad and that the 4850 drain more then the lappy's original intent (3870)

so lucky in fact stutering does not hapen no mather the bios i use beeing b14 (AW stock) or Z.29

 

windows starts showing battery low status indicator after about 30mins.....then it just shuts down after a final warning to find an alternative power source.
I only noticed it on the rare occasion that I forgot to plug the AC into the socket.
In HWmonitor it shows the battery charge.....is this accurate?

 

here is a screenie from HWmonitor;

 

not at all mine sho 47360 as max capacitie and when window start crying to find a new powersource it shows that my cell is efectively on 0

but the lappy can run for 1h30 more

 

I have Stutter issues on my m17
is it worth getting the New m17x with dual 5870s ?

 

if youve got the money do it......otherwise just buy a fast dual core T9900 or X9100 like mine.

 

I have not used the R2 at all so cannot speculate as to its design flaws. They are fine machines though and if I could, I would have one. You will lose a lot of the awesome accessibility that the M17 has but gain in things like durability and cooling (and weight )

 

Looking for one with USB 3/0
wht u guys think of Hp Envy17 ?

 

I like them.....my mate has one. And I think there is a new one out or on the way out....perhaps somebody more knowledgeable can give you more info.

They look and perform great and HP provide a good service iMHO.

I would still want an Alienware as my main machine(desktop replacement) and HP envy for on the go.

 

Yeah the HP Envys look nice but I've never been a fan. Most of my friends who have purchased an HP laptop always end up having a problem in the first year. From hard drive issues to motherboard issues they've had em all. Granted that the 1 year warranty covered all of it but they were out a laptop for 2-3 weeks. Just my 2 cents

 

i tend to agree stay away from HP

 

so what ATI drivers are u guys using? I'm using the latest 10.5 from ATI, do you guys think is a great version?

 

it's a fine version it stoped the locking issue i had with the laptop when it was on the batterie with 10.3

 

now that i think about it i find it a little ofecive that my 6 month old laptop is classified as legacy ...

 

Welcome to the world of laptops

 

ya i know for the last 2 years i've been using a laptop that was rightfully considered legacy even if it still had some kicking power

now my new ebast is considered legacy even if people are still when they see it's stats

 

anyone wanna sell there m17? i need a barebones(sorta)
pm me please!

thanks!

 

Hell....my R1 is legacy because it is a core 2 cpu lol

and we know what it can do

 

yup but the 17x had time to shine the m17 didn't when it got to the lvl where it could be able to (aka 4850 out) they got the m17x out and trashed the m17

 

i'm also wondering would a such thing work in the m17 ?
Asus 32GB SSD MINI PCI-e Eee PC 900 901 1000 on eBay.ca (item 180520217757 end time 13-Jul-10 14:14:29 EDT)

i got the tv tuner slot empty using this would be great as i could have a ssd and 1tb of raid later

 

it wont work as a boot drive, but i believe it can be used as a storage drive. ill look for the exact reason it cant be used for boot though

 

kinda useless if not boot lol but if it's because i cannot put the boot sector on that drive i juste have to install window on it from within my actual install this way the only read on the hdd would be the bootloader then it would switch to it

 

im sure the drive its self is capable, but i think the issues is the pcie bus that doesn't allow it to be recognized as a hdd, so it wont boot from it. but i am unsure. i tried this on my clevo M570ru, and it wouldn't let me install windows on the drive

 

where you performing a clean install?

it might be because the drive require special driver wich windows does not have?

 

yeah it was a clean install, the bios didn't recognize it as a drive, but windows did. Im sure windows has the driver because they are used int he mini pc's for the windows or linux install. when i tried it wouldn't allow windows to be installed. i suppose the only way to know for sure is to get it and try =)

 

looks like it's what i'm about to have to do but the m17 0.29 bios even allow to boot from the sd card

anyway thanks

 

one last i'm about to buy several part for my laptop and my gf's one i'll probably tear both laptop apart during the upgrade and while i'm at it i'd like to replace the thermal paste/pads with better qualitie then the stock ones

so what do i need to replace completely the themal compound on my m17 GPU CPU and NB

(i guess i'll do her laptop with the ramains of mine she does not have a dedicated gpu so no heavy needs of thermal coumpound)

 

just some AS5 thermal compound. the NB has a pad on it, so no thermal paste there. i would also do the paste on the gpus.

 

You'll need about 10cm x10cm worth of thermal pad, now IIRC the one on the NB is about 1mm thick, the ones on the memory chips I BELIEVE are the same IIRC (its been a few months now!)

Obviously thermal paste for the CPU, I'd recommend Tuniq or MX3 because they're non conductive and non-curing.
A thermal paste cleaning kit wouldnt be a bad idea either as they tend to be quite useful in the long run just for getting a decent finish (its amazing how long it can take to get the last remnants of grease out of a heatsink!)

That said thermal pads are mostly much of a muchness. If you dont damage them, you could probably get away with keeping the NB and GPU memory ones.
There's also the thick pads underneath the GPUs, again I wouldnt bother replacing those.

 

I have Driver update software

but how to know of Bios update ?
if we need it & how to chk which one we have now ?

Thanks

 

well there a no more bios update since alienware dropped the ball so you need ethier b14 (AW version) or Z.29 (zfactor version) you can see what version you have during boot

 

Thank you

 

it will tell you in the bios it will start with W840 then have .28 or .29 after. there is no more support for it, there hasn't been for almost a year now.

 

I wish there's a support for unlocked overdrive... that way we can overclock our ATI cards easily..... zfactor, where r u?????

 

if you use gpu tool its very easy to overclock them

 

will give it a try again, cuz I used it last time and my system hangs up.

 

well u have to do it incrementally, slowly really. i only had issues when i went to far like pushing the memory over 1050. the cooling just isn't efficient enough to handle higher overclocks for extended periods.