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Hello, I've been reading this forum on and off for about 6 months now, getting great tips but not yet registering. Today I decided to register say hello and thanks for all the great info.
I bought my m15x around Jan, 2011. It came with a08, 460m, 6gb,500gb, 1920x1080 screen, the 740 i7, i forget which wireless card I ordered, ill update a signature shortly in the standard format used here.
I must admit I almost never used my Alien, I was busy with work in environments that a netbook would have been far cheaper to destroy (it lost a mouse button in the process), and I continued to use my old desktop at home.
Fast forward to Sept, with only rare an occasional use I begint o push my old qx6700 off the desk so to speak and commit to 'using this Alien dammit!'
I ordered another Dell cert 4gb memory, it was on sale for 50, still higher then buying it elsewhere but I figured hey they cant give me warranty headaches. Ironically the e2gb chip they used just says Kingston.
IN the past I very occasionally had a nvlddrm.sys error and TDR recovered it, it was rare, strange and well annoying.
As you can imagine with my desktop now depreciated I began gaming on my well, gaming laptop. I would get more often then driver recovering and even blue screens after hard lockups. ran hwinfo, never got about 60C on GPU and 53C on CPU, i have th big battery, air conditioned room, antistatic adjustable desk, bascially the only thing to add is fanning it with palm fronds.
Stealth mode is confirmed off, high perf mode in windows 7 pro (as delivered) engaged...clocks are happy not thottling, cycling. Ran Dell tests, pass, ram memtestx86 on both 6gb and 8 gb configs, pass. reinstalled drivers, same or worse, as conditions seems to worsen over 3 days.
Finally, alien respawn (yes I made my discs) and fresh install, no patches, just as delivered...Hoses on first boot reboots and finishes 'running windows for first time' sequence.
I call Dell, it's month 8ish of my 12 month warranty. They run gpu-z,hwinfo, (all downloaded new since this is a fresh install), then use windows update to patch the machine all the way up to install .net4 this as you can imagine took time..... Machine just continues to black screen, lock, or bluescreen.
Finally they are able to run heaven as a benchmarking test, and I get another hard lockup and a black screen.
After a fairly long call they are sending me a replacement 460m, which I will be installing myself, next day air. the call took a bit longer then I'd hoped, and it seemed that was partially because of the odd irony of offering them a factory install to work with, but over all I'm happy they made good on this.
Last night I disabled my 460m and ran in intel mode using only basic OS and 2d screen to again reinstall nice and clean and apply MS patches in the order I wanted, plus restore most of the applications I wanted so I simply can remove the device, shut down, install replacement card and reboot.
I wanted to thank everyone for the fine a09 guide here, I did use that in an attempt to fix things over the weekend, and also made sure to do the EC correctly, didnt help, didnt hurt it seems.
Im not sure Im going to touch the video driver beyond Dell's delivered one, although the tech tried 280.26 from nvidia's site and it hosed still , since its probably bad memory on the GPU board I suspect.
Well anyway I suppose this is the end of my hello everyone and description of my satisfactory Dell support experience, which I am glad to have since Id love to hack in a bigger card, but dont have the cash for it at the moment.
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Welcome to NBR... well you had a tough time, lets just hopwe that the new one is perfect and solves the issue
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how you did that ?!?
First post and m15x 460m went bad
Discussion in 'Alienware M15x' started by incynr8, Sep 6, 2011.
