M11x Optimization Thread

1. didnt try.. but it should work as many reviewers said.
2. yup! its playable.. try to read gaming thread for m11x
@Batboy:
Can you just edit the 1st post and add all the useful tips many users said??
Many are scattered around this huge thread. It ll be easy for all to m11x owner to use this thread as reference when they format their machines or something like that. Or you can just give the tip title and point it to the actual tip page.

 

Keep in mind to get the SIM to work you must have ordered the Gobi card installed. Otherwise, it won't work.

 

One reason I love Android phones is the ease of tethering your phone to the PC to access the 3G networks.

 

RAQemUP, question on that if I may. All of my friends that purchased androids are the types that just make phone calls and play games... they don't know what they're doing when it comes to the "pro" stuff.

What app are you using for tethering, and is it one that you have to jailbreak/unlock/hack onto your android? Also which phone are you using?

Also, I ask this because I plan on doing it with my m11x so semi-relevant !

 

Well I know of 2 ways to do it.

One way is to pay $30 for PDAnet. This one does not require you to hack your phone at all and requires you to hook up your phone via USB to work. I was using a beta version of this awhile back and it was working fine.

The second way is to root your phone (ie jailbreak/hack). So long as you follow the steps online for w/e phone you are using, it takes a tops of 10 mins and is totally worth it. Unlocks so many new features and people are adding in the most current Android OSs on top of it. Many custom roms out there add in the tethering options without you having to do a thing other then turning it on. You can easily install the program in yourself if it is not included.

Currently I am using a T-Mobile G1 and I can either tether through USB, wifi, or even bluetooth. I did not have to install anything on the phone as the custom rom I am using had it all setup to go. I normally tether my phone through USB as I like to charge my phone at the same time.

 

Ii see you edited your original post.

Did you try the scrybe software from synaptic? I have not had a chance to mess with it yet...

It can be done without using a boot loader. when I have spare time I will look at this. Someone will get to it eventually.

 

yes Scrybe is awsome.. just tap with three fingers and you can do scribble stuff its pretty cool give it a go

 

Thanks for the info! I'm still holding out hoping an N1 comes to AT&T... you can diss them all you want, but I've never had an issue, and I like that you can get a phone call and check internet-based information at the same time without having to be on WiFi.... Verizon 3G can sometimes take forever to reconnect after the phone is asleep so I'm reluctant to go to them.

Whatever option I go with, I'm gonna make sure I can tether whatever laptop I'm hauling around.

 

Oh and before this comes up again...

Please do not post anything relating to jailbreaking an iPhone or any other device if it violates the EULA/Terms of said device. This type of discussion is not permitted on NBR. See forum rules if you have questions or PM me.

Thanks.

 

Sorry, Batboy - I knew/assumed there were "non-official" methods, hence why I was asking if it was an official method or not.

It's really the only feature I want on a cell phone that they don't all currently have, and I haven't seen any steps forward in that category. It worked briefly on the iPhone without mods briefly when AT&T/Apple added it to the firmware in 3.0 and it worked amazing, but then it suddenly vanished again after a couple days.

I'd love for it to be a "supported" real feature on my next phone that doesn't cost me an extra $ each month.

 

Has anybody tried tightening the memory timings on the stock M11x RAM? I think Spires had some tweaks on aftermarket memory, but I was curious if there was any headroom out of the box. The CPU is definitely the weak link in the M11x, and anything I can do to give it a little push is welcome.

 

When using the touchpad, it's much faster to just do a two-finger tap for right click.
This is how it works on Asus Eee netbooks, not just Macs.

I hate to give that up.
3 finger tap for opening new tabs is another time saver.

 

How big a difference do the lights make on the battery life? Anyone have some numbers to put in?

 

@impruv
for me it adds a good hour.. or i'm tripping out.. well at least that's what my battery says when i have it off.

@dallow
yea.. eee have synaptics too right? I don't see how a driver can't be made to just simply enable the feature and how do you do three finger tab open?

 

So for those who have been saying they get about 6 hours, is that with the lights on? So in the case that I turn the lighting off I'll get 7? If that's the case... awesome!

 

Yeah, they do.
I don't know if it was an option I had to choose long ago, but hitting a link in Firefox with three fingers opens it in a new tab.

There's lots of gestures you can set up, like three fingers + slide up as an alternative to alt+tab to switch programs/windows faster, etc.

Is this Scrybe stuff people mention different?

 

With my OC SU7300, Intel IGP, wifi and bluetooth on, screen brightness 2, and all my LEDs on, I get about 6 to 6 1/4 hours.

 

thanks very much. So it should be reasonable to hit 7 hours pretty easy... sounds great! I'll wait just 1 or 2 weeks more and if Dell Canada doesn't release any coupons, I guess I'll take the plunge anyways.

 

lol scrybe can open things by clicking with 3 fingers that opens this small area where yo ucan draw to open different things like firefox, facebook, applications.. or if you highlight words.. and draw an r it will research the thing in wikipedia.. it's cool. right now i have the top right corner do middle click.. to open new tabs and such..but eh.

Although I still want two finger right click T__t lol

 

yea, 2 finger right click and 3 finger middle click is awesome and useful!

At least it's better than originally when we didn't have any multitouch at all!

 

Ah, interesting.
Yeah, it's weird that it's not there by default.... It's hard for me to get used to laptops don't have this anymore.

 

true true..well the work around is to set the top left and top right with middle mouse click and right click.. but bleh. not the same as two finger.

 

Funny, I got idle down to next to nothing, then downloaded 2 system monitor gadgets, one for network, one for CPU... they upped my idle to 20%! Kinda ironic... didn't know those things were such resource hogs

 

I hate to double post.. but I had to bump this back up..
if you would like two finger right click there's a small google program called
twofingerscroll works great!

 

You can enable two finger right click with the program below.

http://code.google.com/p/two-finger-scroll/

 

sorry if this was asked somewhere else, but does flash 10.1 support hardware acceleration on the intel IGP or the nvidia GPU?

 

Nvidia only for now I believe.

 

@duffy
lol i literally just bumped this thread (post above yours) to post that..

 

I got mine with the GOBI and has some "fun" getting it to work correctly:

This assumes you are using a SIM card that is already activated:

When I put my activated AT&T SIM in, it gave me an error message saying it did not detect the SIM. I rebooted mulitple time with no change.

So I downloaded and installed the applications from the dell web site. That made it worse.. Then the error stated that the device could not be found. So I downloaded and installed the drivers of the dell web site. Once I rebooted and the new driver was loaded, everything worked fine.

I have noticed that this thing has a mind of its own sometimes. I have had to set it back to the AT&T network. It switched itself to Verison somehow. I guess I could have done it, but dont' recall doing it.

edit** I have also noticed that if you put the laptop to sleep with the Novatel software running (doesn't need to be connected, just running) that you will need to exit it completely and restart it. I got the "No devise found" errors again but it works fine if you exit and relaunch the application.

 

Ok so this thread has been pretty useful for me thus far. However even after disabling the alien facial recognition startup and proccess items when i restart my computer, on the same screen where you select your user + input your password I still see an option to use the facial recognition to sign in. Is there anyway for me to remove that entirely so when I restart I get to the user select / password screen by itself, without having the facial recognition menu even appear?

 

I disabled it but can't remember how. I think either at the login screen or in Windows there's an option to "turn off facial recognition". Wish I could be more helpful than that at the moment, but don't feel like turning facial recognition back on,etc right now.

Just dig aroudn a bit and you'll find it.

 

Did you disable the service for it? Batboy talks about it in his post on the first page.

You might have to get into the actual software itself and disable it from starting up in windows before you stop the service again.

 

yea i'll do a little more playing around with it, if I still can't figure it out i'll post again pleading for help haha

 

You know ever since I disabled Alienfx and a whole bunch of other stuff (leaving my CPU at about 1% idle), Mass Effect 2 has been loading pretty dang fast, only a few seconds compared to about 30 seconds before. The CPU usage would shoot to about 99% before when the game is on and now it's only at about 94% or so. Definitely a difference in game play.

 

Guys, can you overclock this machine more than 1.73 GHz?

 

I need to revise my earlier post on this subject. Just disable it via the AlienSense screen within CC (move the slider all the way to the left). Don't worry about the startup items. The M11x's version of CC is different than the M17x current version. This is a nice addon.

You can still disable the startup item if you want, but its really not going to cause that much of an impact to resources.

 

For those that are interested regarding steam since it's preinstalled on our systems, if you opt-in for the beta UI update you no longer have to close steam out to do the graphics switch. Which is awesome for me since I always have steam open on windows startup and having to close it out to switch gfx is one less thing to worry about since that's usually my only application that I have to shut down. Plus the new UI for steam is sweet lookin =)

 

where/how do you opt in for that beta UI update?

 

i stopped pretty much all the alienware software, but then I was recently thinkin that I liked the power management options. Does anyone have an opinion on the alienware power management vs windows management? Or what are you using?

I am currently using balanced profile in windows, modified a bit for max performance in CPU/GPU areas

 

alienware power management and windows power managament is the same except alienware has a better looking gui

 

Under steam settings, I think under the first tab beta participation: click the drop down to beta UI I think and it will restart steam and download the update.

 

@azn = Niceeee... Downloading the Beta UI update now. Had the same thing going too, only process that needed closing to binary gfx swap was steam.

 

careful with the steam beta ui.. it didn't work properly with CODMW2 .. I dunno if that's patched but don't dll it if you have that game.

 

Nope, don't have CoDMW2... But its crashing like crazy...

EDIT: I have it preloaded, or rather my brother did. Is that a reasonable explaination for the crashes?

 

would Kingston 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 N-ECC Ultra LL CL5 (5-5-5-15) SODIMM (Kit of 2) Intel work ?

 

Just installed my kingston 128gb ssd. What a difference in left 4 dead 2! Is there any software programs for ssd's in general that is beneficial?

 

It worked just fine for me. Been playing the heck out of it in fact.

 

Ok... so our M11x's come with 3 partitions... A 30 something meg partition at the beginning of the drive that holds dell hardware diagnoistics. Then we have the second partition which is the recovery partition which has dells image from the factory. This partition is marked as the active partition by dell so the computer will boot into it first and then onto our 3rd partition (the c: drive). Dell does this so if anything goes wrong the machine will still be able to boot into its factory image restore software etc.

So since I took a whole system snapshot when I received my machine and saved it away in a safe place I don't really need that second recovery partition. What's the best way to get rid of it, in it's place get that default windows 7 100meg system partition that would be active and the computer will boot to, get my c: drive to come right after it, and the rest of the 14 gigs that was being used up by the recovery drive added to my c: drive?

Any ideas people?

 

The first post should be updated to include what drivers to use and links and stuff maybe?

I'm probably going to reformat when I receive it. I don't really want the preinstalled McAffee...

I got all the drivers off Dells site and the updated Synpatic driver, and all the wallpapers and login screen and yada yada. I didn't see anything for the webcam or AlienSense or whatever though, are those included in the command center?

Are these things already setup pretty well, or should I just reformat? They made me get McAffee for EPP which sucks.

 

I felt it would be a pain in the to get the login screens, profile screens etc. all back to the alienware personalized set. There are alienware tags all over the OS and they frankley are pretty nice. If it's not too much of a hassle to put these all back if one extracts them from the os in the sate it comes in, I would be all for doing it.

Anyone care to post a guide on how to get the os re-install disk that alienware sends right back up to the factory imagine with the login screens and all?

thanks