New M1730, Performance Issues / Bugs

Hello, and apologies ahead of time for not digging through the massive thread for these answers any more than I did, but I have had my M1730 for just 2 days and I'm experiencing a few very annoying bugs.

• The lights on the Wings will always turn back on if I unplug or plug back in the power adapter. Likewise, if I do a system reboot, they will turn on and stay on even though they are disabled in QuickSet. Once I load quickset, and go into Gaming Options, they turn off, even though the checkbox is already unchecked. I would like to avoid disabling them in the BIOS, but is this the only way for them to stay consistently off during plugging/unplugging of the power adapter?
• In-Game, if I use capslock, numlock, or scroll lock, this causes a black flicker over my entire screen. This is pretty annoying. Any ideas what is causing this?
• If I have my screen lid closed, and I open it, the screen remains black. The way around this is to open the screen, close it, then open it again immediately and the screen turns on. Its pretty irritating, is there a way around this? (I have to double open my lid in order for the screen to turn on)
• Crysis runs very badly with lots of stutterying at 1900x1200 with SLI and settings for HIGH. After reading around I have discovered that I should at least have playable performance with High settings. Medium yields playable performance. Any tips for this?
• I am using the dell performance drivers. What are the recommended overclock settings for the 8800SLI?

Thanks guys, that about covers it. Otherwise, I love the RAID performance. I'm still swallowing the price and until the credit card bill is paid off I think I'm going to be nervous that I could have purchased a tower that is more powerful for less. But overall I digg the pc, I would just like to at least work out these bugs.

 

what Operating system are you using, and what games are you trying to run? i'll assume that you've been to dell.com and tried downloading and installing all the latest updates for your machine.

your screen flickering black sounds like some sort of overlay problem, i get that occasionally when i use my Mouses "on the fly sensitivity adjustment" setting, as it forces the sensitivty meter onto the game screen over everything else, the game dislikes this and causes the whole screen to flicker until the meter eventually dissapears again.. have you installed any additional custom keyboard software which might cause this? as i've not encountered this otherwise on either Vista or XP. what game are you using? or is this for a number of games?

as for your screen lid closing, i've not experienced this, is your laptop set to go into a "sleep" mode when you close the lid? (to check, right click desktop and go to properties(XP) or Personalise (Vista), go to screen saver, power options, advanced, there should be a setting that says "when i close the lid on my computer do X", set X to do nothing, apply/save then test.

as for Crysis, have you patched to the latest version (1.21) as that contains -alot- of performance improvements, especially where SLi and multi cored systems are concerned. additionally you should make sure that you have set your SLi set correctly (as silly as it sounds, you should check that it's actually turned on)

go into the nvidia control panel, go to SLi setup and make sure that SLi is enabled ( by default my own was disabled.. so it needed to be turned on in my case).

after that, go to "manage 3-d settings" and check what the Global SLI mode is on, Alternate frame rendering 1 / 2 tends to work best in my opinion, Split screen has compatibility issues, and single GPU tends to just use the second as a "buffer" so it isn't as fast. bare in mind that SLi doesn't always play nice with older games, and games that haven't been optimised to use SLi properly may get far less of an improvement ( or in some cases, a degredation in performance)


as far as my experience goes, the Dell Drivers were fine when running under XP (good performance and 99.9% stable, both performance and the "Stability" driver), but for Vista 64 bit i went and downloaded 174.37 from Laptopdrivers2go.com and they seem to work o.k. bare in mind that different drivers are good at different things, the best for video playback may give mediocre gaming performance etc etc, so you may need to play around with them to find out whats best for you.

unfortunatley i don't play around with the lights so much, barring setting the colours of the speakers/touchpad via quickset, so i can't help you at all there =(

 

1) If you disable the gaming lights from the BIOS instead of quickset, then they'll stay off during bootup. Hit F2 during boot-up to access the BIOS screen.

2) not sure, but I'm guessing the OS or another app is popping up a window in the background

3) Press Function-F8 to cycle between display mods (dual, laptop lcd, exterior display)

4 + 5) Try updating your drivers to at least 175.16 or higher from www.laptopvideo2go.com. Dell's default drivers are pretty horrible. Just make sure to use Driver Cleaner (and Ccleaner) from safe mode to completely remove the previous drivers before updating to newer versions.

 

Oh god, I hope I won't experience this.
Magnus72 said he played cryis nicely at wuxga,high details smoothly

 

Thanks for your response and please let me clarify.

I'm using the Preinstalled Vista X32 Home that came with the Dell. I've updated my drivers to the latest version of the website, but I found the computer came preinstalled with all of them already.

This is for ALL games. I am suspicious it has something to do with the little CAPS LOCK: ON thing that comes up in the lower right corner of the screen when i click caps lock/num lock. I will try to disable this and see if it does anything.

No, I have specifically set this to DO NOTHING when i close the lid on both power profiles. I have to open the lid once, close it, and open it again before my screen will activate. The computer is running fine this whole time, I can have music playing and downloads running, so its not sleeping or hibernating.

No. I have not patched at all and I'm using the stock installation off the CD. I will do this, thanks for the tips, I'm almost sure this is the issue

Thank you so much for your help especially with regards to patching Crysis. I would appreciate any feedback from someone regarding the LEDS and the Display, but I feel that this is just a BIOS bug that has been ignored by Dell (and probably will stay that way considering its not a huge issue.)

 

Thanks to everyone for replies, + rep added to all of you. I'll update my drivers to the latest Nvidia (not Dell's) and I'll let you all know how it pans out. Thanks

 

Keep us posted, it seems that when I decided to get the xps1730, people starting having problems...so I don't want to hear more problems coming out