*OFFICIAL* "All Powerful" M15x Owners Lounge - Part 4

I had that big cursor one time

 

hey... inap... just found out there is an issue with 5870 mobility and flash player.. its a widespread problem.. due to bugs in adobe flash player... it is solved with the update... but now if u downclock ur card to say 200/300 then watch flash videos like on youtube.. then laptop might freeze..... (stilll a bug with adobe flash player and the clocks).... However this is not always the case... because i am on youtube now with the same clocks but no issues....

 

Strange I haven't seen that issue yet and I watch flash videos all the time.
Mostly anime and YouTube sites. I can definetLy say I don't have this issue.

But I do get random flashes at start up, but nothing major. Do you have this problem too.

 

I have had it once... but like did a bit of google and this thing was reported by lot of users.... which browser do u use...

EDIT: cannot get that issue again i think it was something to do with the adobe flash player... Reinstalling flash player worked..... I have lowered the clocks and played 10 flash videos in one go but still the thing doesn't crash or freeze...

 

K thanks for clearing that up.

 

what type of random flashes do ya get.... becuase i don't get any kind of random flashes at startup...

 

The whole screen dosen't flash just a couple of lines maybe. Kindahard for me to describe, just a few lines will be out of wack for a sec on the windows start up screen.

 

yeah!!! get that too.. its probably the time when windows loads the GPU drivers... I don't have the lines but it jerks the "starting windows" thinge... for a microsecond.. i have to look hard to notice that....

 

So ended up buying a toshiba NB 305 instead, it had better specs
I cant follow you guys, Im gone for three hours and I miss pages!

 

Lol yeah it moves quite fast in here.

 

Mine does that too -- just a quick little jitter or jump at the loading Windows screen. Thought I was the only one. It has always done that, regardless of the driver.

 

Yup that's what I have too but couldn't describe it right, lol

 

Must not hurt anything. Everything seems to be working fine.

 

yeah doesn't hurt game play or anything i used, but just thought it was wierd.

 

just going to buy a ssd for me... really can't wait for intel g3... got bored of this slow hdd....(been looking at youtube videos on how awesome ssd's really are)...

EDIT: whats this write cycle issue with SSD's...

 

i wouldn't worry about the read and write cycle life span, just means your ssd won't last forever, but it will still last to a very very long time.

 

Never noticed that. The GT 240m is probably just too slow to display that, ha ha ha!

 

Basically, since SSDs are flash memory, each sector has a limited amount of times that it can be written to. When it reaches this limit, that sector becomes unusable. I'm led to believe that most SSDs have a system to spread the writes over different sectors to increase the life of each sector.

 

That jitter is probably time dilation as your GDDR5 reaches light speed

 

hahahah harry we were talking about the 5870's. just a wierd glitch that happens when turn the system on.

 

That's what I said, bro, the 240 is too slow to cause such glitches! Ha ha ha!

Man, I can't wait till the 6890 comes out! (I've wanted to say something like this ever since everyone was waiting for the 5870 to come out for the M15x!)

 

hahhah sadly by then our lappies are outdated, hahhahha

 

I couldn't possibly scour the thousands of pages of this thread, so I guess I'll just ask. I'm considering this laptop and wondering if there are any major/minor issues or bugs? Thanks in advance.

 

I cleaned out the stock thermal paste and replaced it with MX-3 today, and so far so good. My temps stay around 3C less than before when surfing the web, and about 10C less than before when gaming. This results in the fans running about one notch lower (e.g., games that made the fans run at full blast before now only run the fans at medium level, and games that made the fans run at medium before now only make them run at the lowest setting). In fact, the only way I was able to get the fans to run at full blast today was to run 8 instances of CPUBurn while running Furmark at the same time for 20 minutes. And even then the temps never got above 79.

Granted, this is still not overclocked. I tried uninstalling RivaTuner and using NST instead, but the throttling came back. I'd rather have a constant performance at 550/1350/950 than throttling back and forth between 700/1750/1100 and 383/767/301 during my game! I wish I knew of a way to get NST's high clocks while locking in 3D Performance Mode at the same time

 

I haven't noticed

 

One thing that's starting to annoy me a little is your obsession with clock speed guys... Yes the ATI cards are faster than the Nvidia cards on paper, that said the Nvidia cards have CUDA and loads more GPU accelerated features than their ATI counterparts. I for one didn't even really consider the ATI cards for this reason, I wouldn't be able to edit video in Adobe Premiere CS5 using the Mercury Playback Engine if I had an ATI card... This is something I do fairly often on my laptop, so I'm asking you guys to please just add a little to your posts when recommending GPU's.

Instead of the typical "get the ATI card it's faster" response, just add a little line on the end...

"Get the ATI card it's faster, unless you want CUDA and GPU acceleration"

 

SO updated to ATI 5870 friend?

 

No, I've thought about it, but I'm going to buy a desktop machine in a few months so I might as well leave the M15x the way it is. It's a great laptop, and the 260M is still fast enough to run all of my games (as long as it doesn't throttle )

 

@Identifier
Yes friend, i do agree, well unusual suggestion fro me, put your M15x specs in your sig, It looks good.

 

I'm waiting for the 460M before I change my GPU.. I prefer NVidia for so many reasons.. But let's not trigger a "mine's better war" here

 

just uninstall flash player and download the latest one from adobe's website and intall it...

 

Hey pras, will M15x support 460M?

 

sigh... looking forward to my 3rd system exchange in the next 3-4 weeks. the replaced system was refurb with a badly vibrating DVD drive, flexed keyboard, HDD making clicking noise and a really loose monitor hinge. After 5 service calls, they decided to replace the system

at this point of time, I think I deserve an upgrade to M17x

 

Hey vzxyz talk them into upgrading to M17x, ofcourse you do deserve the upgrade, 3 exchanges in 4 weeks

 

In my opinion, anyone who's needed more than one replacement deserves an upgrade. You spend a lot of money for a good system you can't just change at a store, so some compensation should be standard. Just my opinion, of course.

 

Woot ISP is coming tomorrow and today speed increased dling for some odd reason lol

 

Just got an email saying order was shipped! So hopefully i'll get it sometime this week.

I need some help deciding what drivers to keep and update. So right now the plan is to update to latest Dell ATI drivers, and leave A05 bios if that's what it comes with. Should I be updating to ATI's latest 10.5 drivers instead? Not sure what problems people have been reporting on these.

 

Hey guys, I just ordered my m15x. I'm planning on doing a clean install to upgrade to Win7 Ultimate. Are there any driver issues with doing this? Also, will I need all of Dell's Alienware software (like CC) or can I just install the necessary drivers? Thanks.

 

congratulations!!!
Fresh install is always best thing to do... But install the latest drivers from dell's website.. Install them in this pattern..

1. Intel Chipset
2. OSD
3. Video
4. Rest of the drivers....
5. Alienware Command Centre...

It is not necessary to install the Alienware CC but you cannot change the colours for the LED's on your m15x...

 

The first thing I always do with a new system is make a System Image backup (which is really easy with Windows 7, and has an added benefit I'll mention in a second), and then delete both the "Recovery" partition the OS partition and reinstall Windows from scratch.

With my M15x, I did this procedure once, and after reinstalling Windows from scratch I installed all of the drivers, including CC and OSD and stuff. But I actually don't like AlienSense since the webcam is angled to be just sligtly too high for my face. All it sees is my nose and eyes so it never works unless I shift my position, and honstly it's faster to just type my password than to try and shift my face around AlienFX is also not perfect, since sometimes the alien head and "ALIENWARE" logo under the screen would not turn on. A reboot usually fixed it, and it's only a minor issue that seems to be pretty common, but it's annoying to have imperfect software. AlienTouch also only worked if I had the Synaptics drivers installed, but I didn't want them installed since they suck. I don't remember what the fourth AlienThing is, but it didn't provide much value and I didn't really need the OSD thing either.

So what I did was set all of my AlienFX lighting settings to how I wanted them, and then I deleted the partition and reinstalled Win7 again, but I didn't reinstall OSD or CC this time. The AlienFX lighting works perfectly -- the alien head and logo are always on and I've never had any odd behavior. All of the touch control panel buttons work fine (except for the flying saucer of course), and the machine feels "cleaner".

The reason Windows 7 system images are great is because you can mount them as a drive after you've reinstalled your new Windows. So, if you want the Alienware wallpapers or any other files that were on the original partition, they're really easy to get to. Of course, it might not be that big of a deal now that we have this awesome M15x owners community, since they've already hosted all of the wallpapers on the internet, but it's a good rule of thumb.

 

So wizard, is it best to get the Dell ATI drivers, or 10.5 drivers from ATI's site?

 

Thanks for the input guys. I like my computers to run as clean as possible, so I'll probably get rid of as many unnecessary features as I can. I'll definitely delete the recovery partition - waste of hard drive space.

By the way, I got the 720qm and the ATI 5850.

 

10.5 drivers have better colour contrasts and it will give u better performance as compared to dell ATI stock drivers... u will get more fps in games with ati 10.5 drivers but they have some issues... Like mouse cursor becomes huge sometimes(few users have reported this)...

Best thing to do is to try the ATi 10.5 drivers... look if u get better performance without any issues ... just keep the drivers or else just roll back to the stock drivers....

because there is like 1000 points difference in GPU vantage score with ATI and dell drivers...

 

good to know. Thanks man!

 

Hey guys, I just noticed something. I use a bluetooth mouse (the same one I got with my XPS M1730 years ago), and normally have no problems. I also always use a wireless N connection (I don't have a wired connection), and have no problems. But this morning I switched to a wireless G connection, and while transferring files my bluetooth mouse got very laggy. After switching back to the wireless N connection, the mouse went back to being fast and responsive as normal. Strange!

 

2.4 ghz frequency probably was causing interference as G runs at the same frequency and N can run at 5 Ghz which is why it doesn't affect your mouse. hope this explains what's going on.

 

Bored tonight, tired of doing maths, anything cool I should achieve with my lappy?
Does someone have the link to the winamp plug in for the Alienfx to work with music?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/419484-alienfx-pidgin-winamp-plugin.html

Everythings gone bit slow here... atleast for now!!! i don't like it slow... even inaps missin... Harry, Jstar, tuenk and villosa... no one's here...

 

well right now im dling GTA IV liberty city episodes both of them and im wondering should i be wondering what i can do to optimize them as GTA is notoriously unoptimized.

 

It is too much wondering for a single post ... lol!!!!
This is what happens when there is no one on these threads... just kiddin bro...

Just play don't worry about the optimizations u should get a good 30fps for the game...

EDIT: but if u want to optimize check this out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0xxPSmSYTE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYL3r-smcxY&feature=related

never tried these optimizations though!!!