The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    M15x issues after fresh install

    Discussion in 'Alienware M15x' started by madpenguin92, Jun 13, 2012.

  1. madpenguin92

    madpenguin92 Notebook Geek

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    94
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Hi everyone,
    I recently bought a crucial M4 SSD for my M15x. I decided to do a fresh install onto the SSD rather than trying to migrate the old installation as the old one needed to be wiped anyways.
    I used the sticky guides on this site for the driver reinstall order and used the resource CD for most things (not for the command center to avoid bricking computer).

    I've since encountered a few issues that I didn't have with the old installation on the HDD. The most noticeable one is that with the newest nvidia drivers from dell's site (257.38), I'm encountering driver crashes. These include blank screens for a few seconds followed by a windows popup saying the driver crashed and was recovered. Other times I've had complete crashes where I get a grey flickering screen or something similar and need to force a shutdown. Using the GPU drivers from the CD (186.xx) are more stable, but seem to have brought the audio tearing/stuttering.

    I've since tried using driver sweeper to remove and reinstall the newest of both IDT and GPU drivers, and crashes are less frequent, however there are still grey flashes regularly. however there are still rarer occasions where something goes wrong. Using the search on NBR forums is returning errors to do with invalid search queries.

    I'm also encountering popping in the headphone jack, but I think that was happening in the old installation too. However, I was looking at buying a headset for chatting during games, and to overcome the popping would require a bluetooth or USB headset which are more expensive.

    If anyone has any solutions to these problems they would be greatly appreciated.
    Thanks
     
    madpenguin92, Jun 13, 2012
    #1
  2. madpenguin92

    madpenguin92 Notebook Geek

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    94
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    I've done lots of googling and still unable to find a solution to this problem. It seems many users are using 197.xx drivers and are happy with them. Are these from dell or from nvidia and also will sound work over the display port?
     
    madpenguin92, Jun 16, 2012
    #2
  3. Tsunade_Hime

    Tsunade_Hime such bacon. wow

    Reputations:
    5,413
    Messages:
    10,711
    Likes Received:
    1,204
    Trophy Points:
    581
    Have you tried the latest Nvidia driver?
     
    Tsunade_Hime, Jun 16, 2012
    #3
  4. madpenguin92

    madpenguin92 Notebook Geek

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    94
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Trying them at the moment. Still getting the grey flashes (for a fraction of a second) with the newest nvidia drivers while player WoW. Haven't had a crash yet, but I've no played any games very long at all today to really test it.
     
    madpenguin92, Jun 17, 2012
    #4
  5. Asim_j1

    Asim_j1 Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    59
    Messages:
    103
    Likes Received:
    13
    Trophy Points:
    31
    Try different games and maybe reinstall WoW, I also had flashes whenever i watched a youtube video, ended up reinstalling windows to fix it
     
    Asim_j1, Jun 18, 2012
    #5