M11x Problem/Technical Question thread for New Owners

I don't know where you are located, but if in the US, 1-800-ALIENWARE should do the trick. 2 hours? Really? That seems insane.

 

Won't work at all or won't boot to it? Have you tried in Windows? I'm using a Dell (Adamo branded) USB drive (bluray) without problem...

If they won't work at all, can you give me the specific make and model numbers and I'll see if by chance we have them around here somewhere?

 

If you are having this issue, can you please send me a PM with your service tag? The light doesn't work at all or you just have to press really hard to get it to work? If you press really hard, is everyone denting their bottom panel?

 

I have all my battery settings set at "never" for (turn of screen, backlight) all those things, but if I leave my laptop for X amount of minutes the brightness turns all the way down to 0, and when I come back to use it I have to turn it back up to 3-5 bars. Why is this happening I set it so it doesn't dim after X amount of time.

 

You need to add the executable for the game to the Optimus whitelist. Steam is just a front-end that runs another .EXE file. Look in the game properties to see where the .EXE is and then add that path and file to Optimus and it should resolve the problem.

 

Can you double check the advanced power management properties and make sure everything looks OK there? I'm guessing that something isn't set quite right. If on never, it should obviously not be dimming. There isn't a setting in BIOS for the M11... If it continues to occur, can you give me some additional details on how long it takes/etc? Is anyone else having any problems like this?

 

FN+F3 disables ALL wireless in the system. I've already sent a note to engineering asking if we could have some sort of enhancement to this feature in the future. If so, what would you guys want?

State 1) All Wireless On
State 2) All Wireless Off (WLAN/WWAN/BT)
State 3) WLAN & WWAN Off/BT On

That cover it? Don't know if they can do this, but worth checking for sure...
I know we have this on some of the Latitude systems...

 

This was an oversight during development. The NIC is actually 10/100, which is what it states when you order the system. The manual will be corrected. Apologies for any inconvenience. If this truly is a deal-breaker for you, I'd suggest you contact support and explain what happened/return the system for a refund.

Sorry about this - not sure how we missed that in the documentation reviews...

 

That sounds fine. Although if you wanted to cover all settings a fourth one would be Wireless on/BT off.

 

I know for me, state 3 would make more sense like

State 1) All Wireless On
State 2) All Wireless Off (WLAN/WWAN/BT)
State 3) BT & WWAN Off/WLAN On

because if I'm using battery, then I'm mobile, and that means I don't have any place to use a BT mouse, but being mobile means more likely that I need wlan on because I won't necessarily have a wired connection nearby. I can't really think of a situation where I'd only want BT on.

 

It's all good, sorted out because of a blunder on my part, didn't plug both USB jacks into the system, always wondered why there was two, but since it functioned off just one on my pc, never gave it a second thought that the other one was important.

 

I've searched the forums for this issue to no avail, hopefully this isn't a double post.

I can't get Aero to turn back on after running a Steam game (some indie title 'Saira'). Windows went to classic, then just stayed there. I've done all the typical troubleshooting by using the Aero troubleshooting wizard where it detects the Desktop Window Manager is disabled and re-enables it and even checked the manager's service that it's running and I'm stuck in classic mode. I've even gone so far as to reinstall the intel and nvidia drivers.. still nada.

Has anyone experienced this? I'm fairly good at troubleshooting my own issues but this one has me stumped.

-Thank you for any insight!

EDit:
i7
4GB
SSD

 

That's pretty typical - I have a hard drive with the dual plug requirement - just not getting enough power with one. Glad you got it to work!

 

System Restore fixed it. I'm still trying to track down the culprit, I'm leaning towards Live Mesh as it had problems in the past. .. Anyway, carry on.

 

Ahh, I have finally fixed my battery issue on my r2, I am now getting ~5 hours of battery life, wish it was as high as the r1 though.'
Whats wrong with my battery bar, at first it was saying 3:34 minutes of battery life, now look at the attachment, is happening LOL!

edit: now its saying 6 hours full charge

 

That's great to hear! 5 hrs of batt life is all I am looking for.

Out of curiosity, how did you 'fix' it? Or was it just the matter of conditioning the battery?

 

Hi, I got the m11x r2 with bluetooth, I would like to know if when I turn it on should a bluetooth light turn on too?

 

Having a major hardware failure with my newly received M11x R2 i7.

Just started it for the first time and windows just finished booting to the desktop when bam, the screen went blank suddenly. After pressing the power button and restarting I can hear the windows start up tune but nothing on the display. The Alienware logo lights up so power is going somewhere to the upper display. The screen remains completely blank though as if no power is going to it.

To confirm it was the display I hooked it up via HDMI to a TV and the graphics card is indeed functioning. Toggling F1 between the displays shows that when I set it to the laptop display no image is shown.

I called Alienware and they said that the WHOLE display needs to be replaced and that they will have to send a tech with the replacement part.

Now that's what I call a lemon. Has anybody else had a similar issue?

 

Unfortunately there isn't an indicator on the m11x.

 

ok, thanks. i was just wondering. i thought there was one and wasnt working or something, but now i know there is no light.

 

not sure how old your laptop is, but needing to replace an LCD panel on newly received unit is just...unacceptable. Good luck with whatever you decide to do. I'd get the unit exchanged if I were you tho.

 

So, about overclocking the i7-i5....

So, at first I was reading that OCing the i7 was worthless since it SLOWED DOWN the processor when turbo boost is on. THEN I hear that OCing the i7 is fine if you turn off turbo boost. AND THEN I hear it's fine to OC the i7 even though turbo boost is on......what?

So my question is, what's the deal with overclocking the i7? Is it stable with turbo boost on/off? Is there an actual difference in clock speed? What's better, OC or turbo boost? Finally, I know you can get up to 2.27ghz with turbo boost, what's the comparable result with OCing (turbo boost off)?

 

It is hard to say. The CPU has a thermal limit which decides its Turbo Boost performance. By overclocking, the Turbo Boost frequencies would potentially reach higher, but the thermal limit is still the same.

What I think is important, is the minimum FPS. If you overclock, you should get a more stable gaming experience. Do you want your FPS to be spread between 20-80, or more stable between 30-60? I prefer the latter.

And I don't know if Turbo Boost is optimal for every game/application. I prefer a high stable frequency. So, I would overclock and disable Turbo Boost, and then carefully watch and see if enabling Turbo Boost would make positive difference.

I don't know if the CPU checks its thermal limit if Turbo Boost is off.

 

I reinstalled windows on my M11x after changing the HDD to a SSD and I cannot get the wifi to work at all. Which drivers should I install?

 

Drivers and Downloads

 

Installed that and still no luck.

 

hit Fn+F3?

 

It seems that something was wrong with my router and not the drivers but thanks anyways!

 

Is It Normal for the wifi not to work connect while overclocking 162

 

It's possible. Try turning OC off. If that brings back wifi functionality then start with 160 fsb and go down until it returns.

 

Thanks! It worked at 160

 

good thing

if it fails again try to reset the BIOS, then do the Fn+F3 to turn on wifi then install the driver.

My lenovo's bluetooth wouldn't work when I reinstalled windows 7, and had to do the trick above to get it to work. Originally designed for vista so it was a pain

 

SAME here this is why i joined today. I can run Left 4 Dead 2 nicely at like 40-50fps idk mayb a little slower idk why, but then i tried to run GTA4 and i cant even make it work, it wont recognize my 335m graphics and when i open the graphics tab in the game it says the currently allocated ram is only 54mb when the minimal it needs to run the game on low is 202....like wdf?? i got 1gig of ram for it....god.

 

btw i tried to overclock at 168 or whatever the highest was and i always get the blue crash screen. wdf. and also, i dont think that the Nvidea 335m is actually boosting graphics for some of the games i play. like GTA4 and crossfire. crossfire takes SOOOO little graphics, and i find myself getting 25fps. its like freaking counter strike. im even overclocked at 160. WDF im also dropping $1300 monthly payments for this rig....i7,4gig ram, 250gig hardrive...

 

call the losers.

 

Moving my own post from another thread to here.

It seems like this system is not even stable at 158 base clock. It has crashed a couple of times while running Prime95. With Turbo Boost at x17 multiplier, that becomes 2692 MHz. I don't know why the core voltage is not shown on CPU-Z.

At any case, a more interesting thing is the max bandwidth memory speed tab is 667 Mhz. Isn't that supposed to be 800 Mhz?

 

The little wireless icon above the ESC/F1 key is the indicator you should be loooking at. When turned on, all of your wireless should be enabled. When off, it should all be off. Right now, Fn-F3 will only toggle all off or all on. I'm hoping that I can get engineering to make it toggle between several choices, but still TBD at this point...

 

I know this isn't what you want to hear, but your system might not be stable when overclocked at all. Most of them seem to do pretty well in the 150s. Very few will run in the 160s. I have one that won't run beyond the 130s. There isn't a guarantee that the system will run at any specific level though. If you're having trouble, keep cranking it back another notch to look for stability.

CPU-Z doesn't work properly on the M11x or the M11xR2. Known issue and already discussed in detail here...

 

I can't PM you because you are new, but did you get this resolved? What was the issue? I'm wondering if maybe the video cable (underneath the keyboard) came loose during a rougher than normal delivery or shipment?

Thanks...

 

Thank you for your reply. Guess I should be glad with the kinda stable 158. I haven't started following this forum for long, totally missed the CPU-Z issue. Would you recommend another CPU monitoring tool?

 

I'm having issues with my brightness. I've created power profiles and changed the brightness. After the laptop hasn't been touched for the set time the screen dims however after I touch the track pad or press a key the brightness does not go back up to the set level. This is incredibly annoying. Any ideas?

 

Adjust your power settings in the Alien Fusion area of the Command Center.

 

Yep. That's it. What a pain. It sucks that the power settings don't mirror.

 

Just got my R2, i5 4gb, having problems getting things transfered from my old computer to the new one. all im doing is copying files 16gb of photos over my home wifi network, I set it up and walk away to come back later and find the computer frozen. Lights are still on but I have no responce w/ keyboard or mouse, anyone have this issue or know how to fix it???

 

Do you have OC enabled? If so then turn it off and see how that goes for a while. You might need to lower the FSB a bit if this is the issue.

 

OC is off.... not really sure where to go from here

 

Maybe pulling the battery for 5 minutes? Very easy to try. Failing that, call support.

 

Look for errors using the Event Viewer. In the viewer, click in Windows Logs and check in both the Application and System logs. If the computer froze, the error message(s) should be just before a 'Kernel-General' log with event ID 12.

edit: Let us know if you find something intersting.

 

Can someone please explain what CPU power management is in Alien Fusion and what the numbers mean. For example, what should I use for maximum battery life and maximum performance?

Thanks

 

Ok I searched for this but did not find an answer. How do you disable the caps lock notification that pops up on the right corner of my screen. It's messing up my game when I use the key. Driving me nuts...