Help with 260M

My Newphew is having problems with his M17x R1. I believe it is an R1 as it has dual 260M video cards. In his device manager it only shows the 9400 graphics card. The 260M Dual GPU are missing. Next we look at the control panel and see that he updated drivers from the Nvidia site on May 2. He told me that he had problems after downloading from the Nvidia site and had to have technical help to get his system running again. Evidently he was having problems with a game freezing and thought going to the newest Nvidia drivers would help. The nvidia control panel he downloaded only sees the 9400 and no options for 260M and no options to turn on SLI.

We tried to delete the Nvidia control panel, Nvidia driver, and Nvidia physx and than download the newest Dell Video drivers for the 260M hoping this would fix the problem. After deleting all the Nvida drivers he could no longer connect to the internet. Are the motherboards Nvidia on the R1? We than got a bus error of some kind after deleting all Nvidia drivers. Than we used windows restore to revert back to the way it was.

He also has deleted McAfee but still has remnants of that garbage on his computer. After the failed McAfee uninstall he was never able to add any other antivirus as they won't install as he can't get anything else to install.

Could someone with a samiliar rig confirm that their should be 3 video device drivers in the Device manager. Thanks.

Does anyone know the the exact procedure for reinstalling the computer to the exact same way it was when it left the factory? I believe there is a partion on the hard driver for recovery but not sure the exact procedure. Has anyone tried this and do you need a disk?

Thanks very much for your help.

 

go to bios>advanced > graphics option, set hybrid to 'ENABLED'

 

Hopefully he still has the manuals that came with the computer. The manual should have a disk pocket in it with a recovery disk (used to reinstall the OS) as well as a driver's disk. Pretty much just use the recovery disk to reinstall the OS, then use the drivers disk to reinstall all of the drivers that you need.

As heah said above, go into the computer's BIOS and ensure that hybrid graphics are enabled before you install the drivers.

As the motherboard is an nVidia board, and it uses Hybrid SLi, having Hybrid off in the BIOS can cause problems when installing drivers and with the wrong setup can shut off the 260Ms altogether.

 

Thanks for the great advice. Will check the bios and enable the cards. I know my M17x came with the operating system and drivers on disk but I thought there was a full copy of the factory settings on a partition that could be used to restore? He also has a defunc McAfee I need to fix as well. Do the R1's have the Dell Data Safe feature? I think that is a full system restore to factory settings? Thanks again for your help.

 

I believe F10 is the Alien Respawn, full restore (wiping ALL of your data & reverting it back to the software as it was from the factory) on the M17x-R1.