Dell XPS 15 L501 *Owner's Lounge*

Would the blue screen give me any important information in terms of fixing the problem though?

 

It can give you an idea what caused it. Anyway, I agree with weapon; backup everything, reformat & clean install. If the BSOD still happen after that, you might want to send it for repair because it might caused by faulty hardware.

 

Any guides out there for backing up, reformating, and a clean install? I've never had to take such drastic steps, so I'd need a little help. And thanks to everyone that's helping out. Much appreciated!

 

I tried to install the Nvidia 270.61 driver update on my XPS L501. It installs everything except the Optimus driver. I guess that's important for the battery life. Hence. want it.

Was anyone lucky to install all the drivers in the package?
How did you do it?

 

@SGS
Seems not many replied, btw, I am not sure, but some option are available, for you, this is seems the easiest.

To backup, is just to copy the file if you still can go to the system. In the case of failing to go to the system, you may use live cd (such as Ubuntu) to access your system, and copy your file one by one (if you are new, you may use BartPE, which is easier).

To format your computer, the easiest is to access the system recovery provided by dell. It is usually a special key, or by pressing f8

To clean install, it is a bit complicated. You need the OS Media Kit or at least Windows 7 DVD (not the recovery DVD), and install it from there. This cause your recovery partition usually gone, and require you to install the driver one by one.

The full guide can be refered to here
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell/453164-dell-system-recovery-guide.html

Hope this can help... It is not hard, if you follow the step correctly

CMIIW

 

On the L501, is it possible to use the Displayport AND HDMI?

I have my HDMI port connected to > Onkyo TX-SR508 > Samsung 50" Plasma TV.

When I plug my 24" LCD into my Monoprice displayport > HDMI converter and then HDMI cable into my LCD, nothing happens. The LCD is not detected. I have tried everything.

Help!

 

Hey everyone, I own an xps 15 and I believe as everybody I've being struggling with optimus. I would like to see if anyone could help me out with a problem. I run gta iv maxed out easily with my gt420m however after I install the ENB series mod for GTA IV the game starts normally but with the intel hd graphics and not with my dedicated gpu, despite I tell in the nvidia control panek to use the gt420m. I was hoping someone that has tried this already give me some feedback or that anyone with gta iv tries out the ENB series mod and tell me if they get the sameproblem as I do. I would be really grateful.

 

timoric, you went way back in the thread to find that old post.

My old 9300 is still working. It has been demoted to desk duty only but still going strong but might be coming to the end before long. At least for the gpu. It started showing artifacts on the screen a few days back.

Anyway, since that post you quoted I had that particular laptop replaced and the little problems I had with the first one are not happening on this one. It has been perfect from day one. I'm a happy L501x owner!

 

Inspiron 9300 RIP.

I have had some time to play with my L501x for a week now and how some observations.

First off, I got it off Amazon.com from a reseller for $750. It had a tiny crack adjacent to the the left silver screw at the top back bottom of the laptop in the silver part that borders the battery. I called Dell and they sent out a tech to replace the bottom for free, it took less than 20 minutes and is as good as new, the only thing I had to do was take a sticker he gave me where he wrote down my windows 7 key and I attached it to my windows 7 disc sleeve.

The sound is good, but don't get too excited, we are talking two dime sized speakers with a slightly larger subwoofer underneath. I watched a movie on Sunday morning and it was plenty loud in a kitchen and dining room at about 40 percent volume while walking around within 15 feet.

The laptop feels pretty light to me, lighter than my Studio XPS 1647. The build quality doesn't scream high quality to me. It feels like thinner strips of aluminum, thinner plastics, and a thinner than I would like aluminum deck that seems to be really a very thin veneer over plastic. It doesn't feel as substantial as the 1647 because you don't have the metal body underneath. It feels more like an Inspiron quality with a few aluminum accents.

On the plus side, the finger prints are minimized, especially on the lid. The palm rest still shows some smudges but not as bad and is easily cleaned. The mouse pad is large and feels good under your hands, the buttons are pretty good but feel one step cheaper to me than the 1647 buttons. It is like the whole computer is more hollow or something. The keyboard is nice and clicky with just a little flex and a pleasing gray coloring that seems to hide finger oils decently and perhaps resist them, time will tell if I get the dull colored space bar from hand oils.

The 15-inch screen is noticeable smaller than the 16 inch screen to me but has good color, clarity, viewing angles, and refresh rates. Sometimes you just marvel at how good these RGB screens can look. I will say though on lower quality downloaded movies you aren't getting a huge increase in enjoyment with this screen, the source has a lot to do with it and I am not sure that the contrast is ultra high either but it is viewable from most angles and you won't see a negative black effect.

Gaming has consisted of StarCraft II at 1920 x 1080 on medium, it worked at 50 plus frames so I moved it up to high and am getting over 30 so it stays there. I feel like it will handle my other games well so I am downloading my EA games collection from the store over night to install, as well as a few Amazon games I got - Command Conquer 3, 4, and Red Alert 3, Dragon Age I, Crysis, Mass Effect I and II and DeadSpace to name a few.

The wireless performance with the 1000 intel card has been great, I was concerned about it but I seem to get the max speed and Youtube works pretty well, I hate that FIOS sucks so bad on my Youtube high def videos not sure why, I have a desktop plugged in and it often buffers and can't play the 1080p or even 720p stuff. This card has been able to do that better than the wired desktop so that is a good thing.

I installed my own back-lit keyboard and it was cake. Take the battery off, remove one screw marked with some letters numbers and K and then gently pry off the entire deck and palm rest and remove the two screws holding the keyboard and the ribbon cable and replace, the first two days I couldn't get the deck off, it just required a little more pressure at the top adjacent to the screw and it finally came loose and I worked my around the rest of it with no damage done. You also can access the hard drive after you do this.

Dell sent me the driver disks when I filled out the online form mentioned in this forum on page 1, I believe, no problem. They did the same for my XPS 1647, the 1647 came with Roxio Creator 2011 which is newer than the version I got with this computer so I installed the newer one, they also include a link to get a free pair of 3d glasses which I sent in.

This computer doesn't have the clear glass or plastic coating over the screen, it goes to a more traditional bezel. I kind of like that because I had a few dust particle issues on some other machines and it doesn't take away from the view in any way.

I have the 9-cell battery. It is good and bad. Good to lift the bottom for heat dispersion, bad for sitting on your lap. You really need the cheap gray plastic Logitech lapdesk with the one fan that I have to make it lap-friendly and to reduce heat. I think 4 hours seems about the high end of what I can get non-gaming.

Speaking of heat, this thing puts out a decent amount of heat from the fan on the left side, so it isn't exactly cool. However, the touchpad and deck feel fine. I don't think mine has any Nvidia Optimus, I have the 2gb video card with the latest dell drivers, the 435M, and the 1.73Ghz i7, I haven't seen it, maybe it does have it and I missed it.

Overall performance is very snappy with instantly opening web windows, fast frame rates in games, and an overall snappy experience.

I would give this laptop a 7 out of 10 and encourage Dell to replace the parts used for the bottom with all aluminum, slim it down, and change the deck color to something other than boring dark gray, perhaps a lighter gray that looks more like the old XPS machines 4 years ago, lighter color will show no finger prints, if they get rid of all finger prints and use metal, it would just feel better.

 

Anyone know of a Blu-Ray drive that is internally compatible with the XPS 15 L501X? I am really regretting not getting one when I bought the machine, now I want to buy one, but can't seem to find one that works in the drive bay.

 

Uh....anybody?

 

Try this thread.

 

hi all,
need help with my XPS
can anybody tell how to downgrade from bios A07 to A06

 

i bought a Dell XPS 15 in January. Everything's been working fine. But a few weeks ago I started having some very annoying problems. Somethings been happening that causes my laptop to freeze for a few seconds and then start working again. The worst is when watching movies or videos. The videos keep skipping constantly after about 10 minutes of playback.
I did a factory restore but the problem still happens. I don't know what to do. Thinking of going to the Dell Service Center. What should I do?

 

Check your HDD

 

thanks for the quick reply. i was wondering if the Dell Service Center would do that for me. my dell premium warranty is still active.

 

Bios A08 released by Dell.

1. Fixed battery capacity does not report correctly in Dell Support Center.

 

anyone tried new bios?

 

Got the new Bios..haven't seen any changes. No changes in the Bios setup I can see either...wonder what the improvements are, if any.

 

Ok, have noticed that the boot up time is significantly (maybe 20-30 seconds) longer with the new Bios. Anyone else experiencing this?

 

Fixes and changes in new bios:

1. Fixed battery capacity does not report correctly in Dell Support Center.

No increased boot up time in my case.

 

Yes, I am seeing it be substantially longer also.

 

i just got my laptop today. What sort of temps are y'all experiencing while under full load(gaming). I was getting mid 80c to even 90c at one point, thinking about getting a laptop cooler.

what do y'all think?

 

edit - whoops

 

Did the the cooling pad help at all?

 

A little bit.

 

how do i know im using the 540gt and not just the intel 4500

 

You should be able to notice difference in performance, I believe you meant to post in L502 thread.

By the way what is the best free blu-ray playback software? Just updated to Optiarc 5730S and WMP won't play blu-rays.

Any free burning suites (Nero equivalent/similar)?

Thanks!

 

For some reason the startup time for my L501x has become increasingly slower and slower over time and sometimes Windows Aero doesn't even load. Right now its like 2-3 mins and I have no idea whats going on. I ran MSE and Malwarebytes. I ran CCleaner. I did a diagnostics and nothing. Anyone else have this problem before or know what I should do?

 

Good chance it is a driver that you have installed. Have you installed anything new since the issues started?

 

Over the past week, I have started hearing a muted click and then "beep" sound from inside the computer. It's very intermittent and only happens maybe a few times a day. Any thoughts?

 

Hi all,

Having a bit of a problem as of late and have no idea why. I happily bought my xps back in December and its worked fine for me. I got the i5 model with the nvidia optimus 420m. I also upgraded to 8 gigs of ram a few months ago which helped improved performance a little.

I've been using it a lot for gaming and it has worked like a charm until recently, like the last month. A lot of my games which previously ran very well or perfectly, are now running incredibly slowly or not running at all. A few forums said that the results I'm getting recently are from the integrated Intel hd card being selected for most of these games, even though I've defaulted individual programs to the Nvidia card as well as turning it 'always on' in the optimus global settings.

I've been originally updating my drivers using the nvidia website rather then the dell one as they seemed to fix graphical problems I've been having so I suspected them. (current version is 280 I think ) I downloaded the previous drivers (ver 266) officially provided recently by dell and did a clean install to downgrade to these. This has unfortunately not helped at all and a lot of the programs/games that were perfectly playable on this laptop a few months ago seem to be running from what it seems like the intel HD card.

I've also done a ton of diagnostics such as direct X and also double checked the device manager drivers and it seems like theres no problem with the Nvidia card as far as I can see, the computer thinks its running normally

Is anyone else having the same problems, or does anyone have any idea how I can fix this?

P.S. I did run the program combofix in the last month as I had a suspected virus and it removed a few bits of dell software along with it (like media key functions etc). Could this have been the culprit?

Cheers,

Velcro

 

Please run GPU-Z in the background while playing games. Don't forget to select Nvidia GPU in GPU-Z windows & tick both options in the Sensors tab. While you're playing games, GPU-Z will record the GPU load, core/memory/shader clocks, etc to a file which will be useful in troubleshooting the problem. If the log file show an increasing in GPU load as well as core/memory/shader clocks, that means Nvidia GPU is being use & active.

The other alternative is some games allow you to change to windowed mode. When in windowed mode, you can check whether Nvidia GPU is active or not using the Nvidia Optimus icon in the notification are.

This troubleshooting only to determine whether Nvidia GPU is active or not. To make sure there is no problem on the Nvidia GPU. To fixed the problem, you might need to format & reinstall fresh windows.

 

Does anyone know who sings this song?
Record - N/A - 522231 | Nghe nh?c mp3 | Nhacso.net

It's the Waves MaxxAudio sound test song.

 

Hi kizwan,

Thanks for the reply. I tried what you said with gpu-z and testing crysis and mass effect 2. Both games are running off the integrated gpu. I took two log texts and the gpu load on the HD graphics flies up while the gpu load on the main graphics card. Everything seems to be defaulting off the integrated graphics while the nvidia 420m sits idle. Also no gpu activity on the nvidia gpu activity program.

Does anyone have any idea how I can try to fix this? or is the only fix available to format and do a fresh re install? I would prefer not to if possible.


Cheers,

Velcro

 

Please post screenshot of the GPU-Z. I want to see the Nvidia GPU.

 

No prob kizwan, here they are:



Idle 1


Idle 2


Ingame1 (crysis)


ingame2



Let me know if you see anything.

 

Thanks. I just want to see whether GPU-Z read the GPU correctly or not. Look like it read OK. (Sorry if you already tried this.) What happen if you set to Nvidia as preferred GPU in Global Settings?

 

Tried that several times and still no joy I'm afraid. I'm completely stumped. I tried completely removing all my nvidia drivers and doing a fresh install but then none of the drivers could find my Nvidia gpu. (I had to do a system restore at this point as I messed up) I think a complete uninstall and format is definitely out of the question, as none of the drivers I had could find my GPU after i cleaned all my existing drivers off my system.

I've even tried downgrading to some very old drivers back from when I got my laptop, but still no progress. Is anyone having a similar issue at all?

For ages I thought the 420m must not be a very good processor, but it turns out I was never really using it at all over the past few months, as far as I can tell. Even when I go to steam and select 'update video drivers' it brings me to the intel homepage rather than the nvidia one that it used to send me to.

Anyone out there at all that might be able to help me. I'm trying to contact dell support at the moment, but they've made it hard to find anything on their website.

 

Does both driver from Dell & Nvidia unable to detect the GPU? It might be just a software problem. Several people already got this problem in the past, on different laptop though, but got it fixed by reinstalling the driver or load BIOS default settings (if I remember correctly). I'd format & reinstall windows if I were you. Dell support might suggest the same thing.

 

They only failed to detect it after I did a clean uninstall of my nvidia drivers using this guide: GeForce Driver Installation Guide - NVIDIA Forums

perhaps I was too thorough in uninstalling them.

I've found people in threads around the internet with similar problems, but they're usually empty threads with no replies. very helpful

I might just do. I'm just afraid of the drivers not being able to etect the video card at all. I'll have to get a hold of a new external to back up my current hard drive as my other ones are full first. I might drop a post here when I'm going to re-install. can you direct me to any kind of guide for re-install on the l501x? or is it buried somewhere deep within this thread?

One quick question, how does one load a bios default setting? Thats one thing I havent tried.


cheers for all the help so far btw, you've been the most help I've found in the past few days. Most people have no clue whats happening to my gpu when i mention the word 'optimus'!

velcro

 

Hey everyone, a quick tip that might well have already been mentioned, but anyway: I increased the battery life of my XPS15 by about 25%, just by using a vacuum cleaner to clear the fan grille on the bottom of the laptop. It had picked up some carpet fluff, so was working harder to suck the air through it. The battery life has gone from 90 to 120 minutes just from doing that!

 

If after reinstall windows the GPU is not detected, we can confirm it is hardware problem. Will need to send in for repair. Regarding the re-install, you should use the Windows DVD which came with the notebook, for this purpose. I have different Dell notebook & mine came with Windows DVD. With this DVD, windows will auto activate. It also restore the Dell logo in System Properties window & also Dell customized Windows Mobility Center (for setting the FN Key Behavior, keyboard backlighting, etc). If you want to use the original Dell theme, you might need to restore it manually though.

Basically, backup your files, format, reinstall windows & install latest drivers.

When computer booting, at Dell logo, press F2 to enter BIOS (usually the hotkey is F2). Then navigate to Exit tab & press enter at something like "Load Default Settings". It will reset all settings to default. Any corrupted data in CMOS, if any, will be cleared/reset.

 

Hey guys, Im thinking about buying an Xps 15 (the new one with Sandy Bridge) and for all you xps 15 owners I was wondering (i tried looking, probably didnt try hard enough) about your 2cents on the xps screen?

I heard that if you change viewing angles you see different shades of light, colors etc, and that the only screen worth getting is the 1080p to avoid these problems.

The one Im considering is the basic one the 1366x768

Your guys 2cents?

 

It depend on your eyes sensitivity. When I said sensitivity, I don't mean "oh no, my eyes hurt", but I actually mean "what is that? oh, that hideous". Some notebook screen, when look closely, really close, you'll see door effects. It doesn't bother me at all because it only visible when look closely. I do not follow LCD screen technology much but AFAIK, RGB screen (or should be called RGB LED backlit screen) is the best & also a bit expensive.

This described most of the notebook screen available in the market.

For me, 1366x768 screen already fine for me. I'm not graphics designer or professional video editor. The only time I will choose 1080p screen if I'm getting a 17" notebook. Anyway, when playing games, I usually connect to my 1080p external monitor.

Just my 2 cents.

 

Never heard it like that (the 1st paragraph) and for my m11x r1, I can look at it from all angles and it will stay within a constant shade of colors and brightness.

I dont know I saw some videos and read comments of a particular xps 15 (the new one ) where you can literally see the color changing as he moved the camera around. I mean I would like to have some friends over watching from this.

Dont get me wrong, I love everything the xps 15 offers, im just wondering about the screen.

 

I forgot to tell you that you should ask this question in http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/564192-dell-xps-15-r2-l502x-owners-lounge.html . You also can see the Dell XPS 15-L502x viewing angles in external review website: Review Dell XPS 15 Notebook (i5-2410M & GT 540M) - Notebookcheck.net Reviews

 

Hey just back to say I did a fresh format and reinstall and the 420m is working like a charm. Thanks so much for all your help and suggestions. If anyone else had any similar problems I would suggest doing the same!

 

Hey All.

I thought I'd share my backlit keyboard mod with all of you.

I bought a used XPS 15 off ebay and have proceeded to mod it out. My first port of call was a backlit keyboard which looked like it was going to be costly and difficult to find in the UK. Luckily I found a post somewhere where someone had posted a Youtube video of an XPS 15 with a Dell 1440 backlit keyboard!

I promptly found this ebay item: NEW Dell Studio 1440 14z Keyboard - BACKLIT | eBay

I bought it and installed it in a few minutes and it works beautifully - all for the equivalent of £30. Sure, the keys are in the wrong place for a UK keyboard - but I'm fine with that as I have a US Macbook Pro which I'm used to.

Here's a pic:



Any questions, feel free to ask.

Cheers