M15x & M17x Touchpad cursor movement & polling rate problems

what about M17xR1?? u.u

 

That would be the "M17x is coming" part. The R1 is just the M17x, the R2 is known as the M17x-R2. This is how things are listed when you look in the products list of your account, or that is how it was for me when I had the R1 and R2 at the same time.

 

Looks like new bios was posted for our polling issue.

YAY

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...2-bios-a08-discussion-thread.html#post6666199

 

TYTYTYTYT

I cant wait to get home and test out the new bios for this.

 

Installed, working GREAT. Just make sure you redo your BIOS settings before going back into Windows. If you're RAID 0, you pretty much have no choice but to redo them anyway.

Polling rate seems to be about 85Hz now. Completely acceptable. Feels just like the trackpad on the M1730 again. Woot! 10 points to Alienware!

 

I installed, no problems, I did not even need to reset my Raid 0 this time . Trackpad works great now.

 

Eh, installed mine and I'm only able to get 61Hz average now. I mean its better then the 20Hz before the BIOS but still nothing like my Viao which gets 82Hz average. It's a step in the right direction at least.

I'm using the drivers from the Dell site for the touchpad.

 

i get around 60hz too, but it's very usable now.
sure, it could get better at around 80-85, but that is a hell of an improvement!!

Thank you Brian!

 

Looks like they promoted while I was at lunch - it made it to support.dell.com quick today!

I agree on the touchpad polling - seems very usuable and was comparable to everything I tested in house around my desk.

Let me know what you guys think about it...

 

Thanks all for the quick tests.. Thanks alot Brian for getting this done! I really appreciate all of your effort.

Rep Given.

 

yup, it feels great!

tyvm for getting this through Brian, and thanks to the team who got it done.
much appreciated.

 

Getting between 54Hz on the outer frame of the touchpad going to the inside to 63Hz overall, so that would be like 3x better what we had before.

 

yup, and around 80 if you uninstall the drivers.

can feel the difference but 60 is still good and you get 2finger scroll as a bonus with a little tweak.

 

Would be nice to have 80 with the drivers though since I don't have to run driverless on my Viao to get that, and this thing cost about 5 times as much as the Viao. Though 60 is much better then the 20 we previously had.

Brian,
Is this still just a step towards the final fix and goal of 80 or higher or is this the end product? Thought I saw something mentioned that we may get a halfway tweak before a final, though maybe I'm just dreaming.

 

I am so happy that this issue is no over for me i had the drivers installed and it was good after the bios update but with the windows drivers its awesome so smooth i can take this thing on the road with me now without feeling its got a short left leg

 

Thank you Dell for getting this done!

 

Finally! Glad my post and research really could get some things accomplished Thanks Dell!

 

I noticed that some people have already downloaded BIOS A08 but just want to make sure everyone knows that BIOS A08 was posted today and it fixes both touchpad pooling and throttling issues for defiant.

Thanks, Alienware Quality

 

Don't worry we will get our r1 bios soon....... e.t.a 2050

 

Nice!
No longer ashamed of letting others use my trackpad Lol
Thanks Brian, Dell and all those who contributed to solving this issue.

Man, I feel for ya : / hope you guys get it soon...

 

I installed synoptic driver, then i uninstalled it, now im at 45hz i can't get it to 80

Im running a08

 

Touchpad is sooo much better. Thank you Brian and Dell!!!

 

How do you remove the Synaptics driver?

 

thanks to brian for this update. i don't have synaptics installed so i was getting about 30-35hz before and now i'm getting around 75-85hz which is very useable.

 

Thank the engineering team for all their hard work. And thank you for putting up with all our BS.

Such a small thing but so vitally important.

This is fantastic!

 

Brian will we get an updated synaptics driver to push it closer to 80-85? just as it is without the driver installed and using the windows default one?

 

Guys with Extreme (920/940xm) CPUs beware of A08 BIOS update as it reduces your CPU performance by up to 30%!!
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...bios-a08-discussion-thread-2.html#post6666538

 

OMG 1 thing fixed another broken... Since I'm on i7 620 CPU I decided to go with A08.

I am now happy to report, I am getting between 80-90 Hz as an average polling rate:


BTW, I am using Microsoft Driver:

 

A big thank you to brian and all who have constantly communicated with Dell and tolerated our unhappiness!

Mouse rate averages at around 60hz, i hope there will be another bios in store that will raise this even more.

Once again, thanks to all those who tolerated our impatience and those who wrote the bios.

 

I mean yeah BIG thanks to Brian and Chris of course. The reason for constant bickering about Dell is of course not him, but other majority of Dell employees.

But what the... tolerated OUR impatience? Most of the people paid what $2000-$3000 for this laptop. LOL... not to mention you're in for a treat if you're using i7 9XX extreme CPU (the CPU that alone costs what ... $1k). I'd like to say thanks to Dell, but I'm not sure what am I supposed to thank for... for making the laptop work as intended, at least mine.

Of course, thanks again to Brain (and Chris), it's of no doubt they sped up the coming of this touchpad fix.

 

Well after seeing that stuff about the extreme core performance drop I decided a slightly better working trackpad was not worth it and is honestly unacceptable and a slap in those faces who paid top dollar for those extremes.

Back to A07 for me and taking my Mamba with me everywhere.

 

Here we go again thanking Dell and everyone on this site from Dell for coming up a year late with a fix for the touch pad and all we have to do to get that fix is give up 30% of our CPU performance my $1000 optional 920xm extreme will now be money out the window. Great choice a laptop with a worthless unusable touch pad or reduced performance making the laptop worthless for my needs. As I said before on this site and been criticized for, this is totally unexceptionable from Dell and kissing up to their employees who are trying to maybe help but have not is a waste of time Dell needs to step up now before a class action law suit is filed or refund the money for a product that is defective and does not perform as advertised. Just to refresh some memory first they ship a unit with a unusable touch pad and they new it then promised to fix it month after month for a year then can't fix it with out making a $6000 laptop perform like a $2000 laptop. If I bought a top of the line TV and it had a fussy picture for a year and the great fix got me the picture I paid for but I lost the sound should I be happy and thank everyone. That is what is going on here. If you want more Info. read the new M17 R2 Bios A08 Discussion Thread
__________________

 

Is it actually legal for dell to remove the option when it states that the CPU is factory overclocked?

If you take a look at the order page, when selecting CPU's it clearly (well for me at least) says Overclocked Processors. Is it ok for dell to remove the overclock which they clearly advertise?

 

They are not removing the overclock feature, read up on the A08 BIOS thread. All they did was limit the multipliers down from 24 to 17 (25 to 18 for the 940). You can still OC, this is in reference to the Turbo feature.

 

it doesnt say overclockable, but overclocked and in the M15x, you cannot overclock the CPU in the Bios, so the only feature that they could mean is the XM running full turbo multi on all cores at full load, unless there is another overclocking going around which I dont know of.

Also, turbo is supported by every i7 quad core. Why would the 920XM be the only overclocked one?

 

wait hold on, they basically gave the CPU a lobotomy so it wouldn't throttle? Is that even legal? Does that effect all CPU's?

 

it only affects the XM series as now they are not factory overclocked anymore

 

Currently on Dell's order site, does not say "Over Clock"

 

It does for the M15x

 

BTW, This is what we're complaining about being taken away. Use to run at 24 multi and is now down to 17. It's all in the BIOS thread.

Well considering this is way off topic for the threads touchpad basis (yea yea A08 is what fixed it but brought up other issues and that's why there is a thread just for it), I am going to say that if anyone if unsure what all the fuss is with the extreme cores and A08 hindering the multiplier of the turbo, they should head over to the A08 BIOS topic and actually read. Everything is explained and tests are being done to figure out just how bad things are for those with extremes as well as plenty of complaining going on to try and get this fixed.

 

Ill get this back on topic, whats the best version of synaptic drivers that will give us the most functionality?

 

Apparently running no drivers (just whatever Windows goes with) gets the best performance at about 80Hz or so. To me that is unacceptable (not the speed but rather not using the real drivers) so I was using the current synaptics drivers on the support site and was able to pull 62Hz average. Not sure if other synaptic driver versions were tested but that is a good idea, if I still had A08 installed I'd test it, maybe someone else would know or if anything you could just try things out and see what you like best.

 

I've been using the native Windows drivers since I got my m17x R2 due to the cursor issue. I've tried the Dell Synaptics driver as well as the generic Synaptics driver, but the native Windows 7 driver was the only driver that actually made my touchpad usable until this latest BIOS refresh.

Since the issue was a polling rate issue that was fixed with the A08 BIOS (and not a driver issue), does anyone have any thoughts as to whether or not we should install the latest Dell Synaptics driver? Or should we stick with the generic (native) Windows driver?

Rockwell, when you were using the A08 BIOS, what was your impression as to the balance of performance vs features between the two drivers? (Aka, was the slight drop in Hz made up for with the "fuller-featured" Synaptics driver?)

 

You will get better performance with the windows native drivers, around 80Hz. With dells/synaptics you will get about 60Hz.
For me the benifit of using Dells driver is that I can disable the touchpad on exteral mouse detection, something I can't do with windows driver.

 

There's always gotta be a tradeoff...

In your opinion, was the drop of 20Hz in exchange for the added features worth it?

 

for my type of usage it isn't, as i am usually on an external mouse and the touchpad when enabled is bothering me when i type and i don't feel like Fn+F12ing all the to disable it.
However those 20Hz can be felt pretty good, so if you use the trackpad a lot i suggest going with the windows driver.

Also, i am not sure what's your config, but in case you have the extreme CPU you should consider rolling back to A07 bios because A08 introduced a 30% performance drop for extreme CPUs by locking the CPU multipliers much lower than before.

 

Here's a test for everyone that's been patting Dell on the back for a job well done:

1. Install A08, use mousechecker to verify your average polling rate is about 80 hz.

2. Install the dell synaptics driver and now your polling rate should be 60 hz.

3. Uninstall the synaptics driver and check your rate. Mine dropped to 40 hz and there was no way to get it back to 80 hz short of reflashing the system with the A08 bios again.

 

it's the second time i see users reporting that behavior.
Brian, are you reading this ?

 

Did anyone really expect Dell to get this right? Broken touchpad update + throttled extreme CPU performance. Dude, you've got a Dell! I have to wonder though, did those beta testers do any real testing? I found this problem within 10 minutes of installing this terrible new bios.

 

I still dont understand why we need a BIOS update to fix the polling rate. On linux the polling rate is a lot higher with any bios :?