misbehaving M9750

Hello, all I thought I would ask a few questions before I tear this M9750 apart.

It is a customers machine and he has had it for quite some time ( I am unaware of purchase date yet but IS off warranty) this unit since day 1 has had problems where if you have the machine running and close the LCD it would hard lock and you need to pull the battery, and the DC power. after a few tries SOMETIMES the machine will come back to life and operate normally. Secondly the unit also hardlocks in exactly the same manner when you even lightly touch the panel above the keyboard.

This unit has was shipped back twice for repair and at one point tech support said it was the AC/DC adaptor and sent him a replacement brick. After the lack of an opeartional machine he purchased a different unit as his main laptop and this one sat in the corner for approximatly a year ( he was quite P!SS3D with it). this machine has prob. operated correctly less than 15 days, in I am guessing a year and a half and I thought I would see if I can get it going for him again

Spec . Area 51 M9750, 2 GB ram, T7200 CPU @ 2.0GhZ, dual seagate 160Gb drives, and Dual NV GO 7950 GTX in SLI

Temps seem to be a little high but that is secondary at this point.

I appreciate any ideas before the tools come out in the am. and overall Id call this a very nice machine ... IF IT WORKED

 

The hard lock might not actually be a hard lock but actually the mouse NOT showing that it's moving. This is due to an older nvidia driver (stock Alienware). This occurs whenever you close/open the lid.

I believe the touch panel can be disabled.. FN-10 or FN11, I don't remember which. It's really not needed if you believe its hard locking the system. This can wait I think.

Lastly, I had a TON of issues with the Seagate 160GB drives. That thing is utter crap. If you can manage to move everthing to a different drive like a 7200 rpm one, that might help.

 

it is most certantly a hard lock, I scoped the memory bus. and one time in 3 it outright turns off the unit. and its pretty easy to kill it bu juts touching media bar while the unit is still in POST, poof instant off then

and I agree on the seagates but it does not make sense for the drives to kill the media butons but I will be swapping the drives out for test purposes as he does not have any current backups.

Update, the unit is currently dismantled and hitting the bench, there are obvious scars on the motherboard ????????????

 

Dont know if any one cares but I will post the results.

this unit must have been assembled monday morning or friday night, the motherboard had a couple of broke solder joints and 3 DEEP scars right to the traces, right above and to the left of the cpu ( topside) which was shorting out with a small piece of wire which was floating around. this resolved the hardlocking issues afte board was cleaned, joints repaired and some scaring re laquered.

Parent graphics card had NO thermal paste on it.

and seagate drive in bay 2 was a total write off with bad sectors

.. the unit is back to running to 100% again, but my customer should not have had to have me totally disassemble the unit and repair it after the warranty was expired.

and FYI I quite like this machine now and runs like a dream with windows 7 7100, may have to get myself an updated model to play with for myself

 

Yeah its amazing how Windows 7 always breaths new life into a PC.....not to mention your good soldering work and electronics knowhow!!

well done.

 

Thanks for the update! I'm glad you found the issues and resolved them! My m9750 is still going strong though I WISH it would just die sometimes... (to give me a good enough excuse with the wifey to purchase a new laptop)

 

I love my m9750 and I plan to switch to windows 7 myself once my machine arrives. (being sent in for repairs atm) But alienware doesn't sell new m9750's from their website that I know of.

 

dont wish for a laptop to die ... the darn things have a habit of listening!

around here its nice because my wife encourages new toys for her to play with as she uses autocad and kitchen design software regularly.... M17X ordered today for her amusement if it doesnt work for her Im sure I can find a use for it in the rest of my repitoir