3 XPS Questions

OK so...
Question 1: After my reformat I have everything working I think besides Windows Media Player which will not start- and I can
t download the version of the microsoft website for WMP 11. Is there a solution I may have missed while searching the forums? (besides another media player- which I will use from time to time- but I would like WMP working as well.

Question 2: Are there any drivers people tend to forget for the system following a reformat? I caught the bluetooth one i think form dell's site as well as the fingerprint, ethernet, quickset (worthless) and some like dell's support program-- also I installed Nividia's 174.93 driver from Dell's site of the M1330- is this my best option? (vista 32-bit) anything I should change?/add and be aware of?

Question 3: That damn clicking noise of HDD, any solutions you guys personally recommend? (yes i searched the forums but I was confused and some techniques i tried did not work). I tried the quiet mode in my Bios but the clicking is still there? should I use the higher performance one?

Question 4: Undervolting (i've done this with all my laptops, but what voltage does anyone recommend for my t9500?

And since this forum is amazing, I'm going to say thanks a ton in advance.

*on a side note- I love the XPS M1530... LED almost sells itself.

 

1) My WMP worked right after reformat... but you can just download and reinstall it, thats fine.

2) Everything is on Dells support site, but make sure you manually run Windows update as it also detects any drivers you may miss. Dell's driver is great, though someone people go to laptopvideo2go and download the latest drivers. Some have lower gaming performance, some get better, so it really depends. I stuck with the Dell driver and it works flawlessly. Can't go wrong when Assasins Creed is running at max settings and CoD4 at max settings with a nice good FPS well above 30.

3) Higher performance mode in bios makes it louder. Personally, I have not had any clicking noises whatsoever until I swapped out to a new hard drive. What kind of drive do you have? If its a samsung, I can tell you right now that my M1530 that came with it was very very quiet. It was a 250GB 7200RPM. My new Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB 7200RPM had minimal clicking noises, but putting it in silent mode really did a good job of silencing it.

4) Undervolting really depends on what other things you have running and it varies for every computer. Though generically they are around the same range.

For the T9500 on the M1530, the max multiplier to be about or around 1.0125 volts. You should get right on that, or slightly higher or lower.

Some things you will want to note when using rivatuner:
1) set the FID/VID transition time to 50us (or a bit higher) - this allows time for the processor to stablize before changing VID
2) set the p-state transition method to "perform single step transition only" - this makes sure that the transition between different FID/VID's will not change so significantly that it destablizes your computer

If you are following the undervolting guide found at:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=235824

 

once again forte comes through- thanks for the advice.

 

Make sure that you install Quickset, it is not useless, this Quickset is the one that controls the volume and play buttons, also it gives you warnings about the ac adapter and the battery so i would recommend you to install it.