windows 7 64 bit on XPS M1730

Anyone with experience installing windows 7 64 bit on XPS M1730? Things to watch for? Recommendations?

Thanks!

 

Psyloid made a nice website about this.
Dell XPS M1730 - 'The Beast'
This is a nice step by step guide.

You can also use the Vista 64 drivers. It worked also for me.

Also we have here a "Dell XPS M1730 owner's lounge" part 3 already. It's like a Valhalla for your rig.

 

Thanks.

I've seen the Dell XPS M1730 owner's lounge, however, I was reluctant to post there as there are too many messages under one thread and it is hard to follow what the messages are about. The forum administrators should have made the owner's lounge a forum by itself.

Anyway I used the search function, I also went to the link you gave me, I came across psyloid's page and from what I've seen people had quite a few issues (fried GPUs seemed to be a recurring theme). I started to think that perhaps it is not a great idea to install the 64 bit version. I will probably stick with the 32 bit version for now.

 

Overheating issues deal with hardware, and dirty dust clogged parts. The OS has nothing to do with the overheating of the machine or any other circumstances, regardless whether if it's 32 or 64 bit. I use Windows 7 x64 for half a year now on my 1.5 year old M1730 and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it and running perfect.

Install the x64 version and use Windows Update and everything else should do it nicely, and automatically. That's what I did. For your side LCD panel you can download the x64 drivers from Logitech to make it work.

 

This sounds encouraging.

The only thing that bothers me with the 64 bit is that at one point I will need some obscure driver and I won't find its 64 bit version.

I am doing application development in java, c++ & delphi, I access databases (oracle) and I occasionally like to watch movies, dvds or avis. I play a game probably once a year.

I read some posts in the M1730 owners lounge by people using win 64 that had the GPUs fried and I was wondering whether the 64 bit drivers for the video card are working properly or not. Here is the scary post:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...0-owners-lounge-part-3-a-160.html#post5965775

He said he installed win 7 64-bit 8 times!

What do you personally think?

What video drivers did you use? I was thinking of using the Vista driver available on the dell support website.

 

His is a GPU issue, there are many who uses Vista and had their GPUs changed, to put that way. As mentioned, it has nothing to do with the OS, but rather a hardware issue. It's a known issue for the M1730. Also if, by that thinking, mine would've have fried many times by now, which it has never done so.

I use the drivers from Nvidia and LV2G. They're good drivers and provide decent gaming performance. Yes, the drivers from Dell's Vista x64 work too; Win 7 retained the same driver architecture as in Vista and it works. In fact, Windows Update will be able to find the drivers for you automatically. There's nothing to worry about, speaking as a Win 7 x64 M1730 owner.

 

I agree with this.
The OS has nothing to do with the GPU failures of the M1730.

I had some minor issues running Vista x86 in the old days when I received mine back in April 2008. Later I changed to Vista x64. Form that time I've never seen a blue screen or what-so-ever. From December 2009 I'm running Windows 7 x64. Again a boring story; no blue screen or other issues. I'm really happy the way my rig is running.

I run the official nVidia 197.16 WHQL drivers. Also keep the back raised a little to perform a better air circulation. If you feel comfortable at taking your rig apart, you can change the cooling paste of your GPU's by Artic Silver 5 or Shin Etsu. The standard paste from Dell is far inferior. Next to that you can clean the fans more properly this way. Never wait to long with cleaning them.

This way you do the most to prevent your GPU's from dying.

 

Thank you.

I will go with win 7 64 and I will come back to this thread to let you know how it goes.

 

It'll go fine. Just do it.

 

ok, I did it (64 bit).

Everything works fine, sort of out of the box. Win 7 downloaded all the drivers I needed, I only installed the quickset app to turn the lights off.

I also turned UAC off because it was driving me insane.

So far so good, but... the fonts are horrible on the LCD (1920x1200). They strain my eyes. I am writing this message from XP and the fonts are so much better! I am not using anti-aliasing (clear-type) and the text is crisp and nice.

I played with the Win 7 themes (aero or not). The windows classic theme doesn't look good. For the other themes if I don't use anti-aliasing the fonts look like crap.

Any suggestions on how to make the win 7 fonts look the same as they are in Win XP theme are appreciated. I will probably start changing the fonts and have the Clear Type turned off.

 

LOL, To me I love small fonts, I think its to each of his own.

To adjust font size, Go to: Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Display

Now by default it will choose "smaller", choose medium or large according to your comfort of viewing. On the left hand panel you can also set the custom text size DPI as well.

 

I wish it was that simple. The fonts on Win 7 are simply f***d (I never used Vista).

I like to edit my programs using white text and black background and my preferred font is Lucida Console. If I turn the anti-aliasing on Lucida Console looks horrible on black background. If I don't turn the anti-aliasing on lots of html pages that use the Segoe UI font look horrible - this includes the VS Studio 2010 documentation.

Some applications such as Ultraedit still anti-alias the menu and the icon text. MS Sans Serif is not aliased but it doesn't support unicode and if use this font for Menus FF displays black vertical bars.

So I am in that scenario, damn if you damn if you don't. No matter which way I go there is something that is not quite right.

If someone else is interested this article presents a solution that will disable the anti-aliasing even for those apps that anti-alias the menus when the clear type is not checked:

http://www.pctipsbox.com/disable-cleartype-font-smoothing/

I find that the menus are not looking good though or as good as they looked under XP ...