Studio 15 weird media control blinking?

I turned on my Studio 15 and the Mute and Volume up buttons were flashing. Everything seemed to be working fine. I could raise and lower the volume, eject, play, etc. Has this happened to anyone else? I restarted and all was well. It's just weird.

 

That's certainly interesting. Did the laptop still boot up like normal, and did the flashing continue in Windows?

I once had something similar...when I first took out my CPU and replaced it, I forgot to twist the flat-head screw to lock the CPU in the socket before replacing the heatsink and all that good stuff. When I tried to boot, nothing happened, except two of the media buttons were flashing. I believe it was volume up and mute as well.

Have you done any fiddling with hardware recently?

 

The computer booted normally, as if nothing was wrong. The lights continued to flash until I restarted. I have not recently done any hardware changes. Very odd indeed.

 

Odd is right. Google doesn't seem to show anything related either.

 

I recorded what happened for anyone who's interested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM6Pn2jf5pc

 

Pardon the useless and obvious post, but...that definitely is unusual.

 

It's only another oddity to add to the list of Studio 15 oddities.

 

Yeah, that sums up the Studio 15 nicely. There's millions of things that even Dell can't explain.

EDIT - while we're talking about oddities in the Studio 15...have you ever gotten horizontal scrolling to work with the touchpad? For the life of me, I just can't figure it out. The touchpad has the marking, and I have the Alps driver installed and the scrolling enabled, but it just won't do it. Vertical scrolling works fine, but horizontal has never worked.

Interestingly enough, horizontal scrolling works just fine on the tilt-wheel on my Bluetooth mouse.

 

That's really weird. Mine appears to be working, a symbol that looks similar to this: <|> appears on the screen when I use it. I haven't actually used it because with this wider screen most pages appear fully. My spiral scroll thing also seems to be working, how useful that one is. Maybe you can scream at Dell again and they will send you a replacement touchpad. AKA THE WHOLE DAMN TOP OF THE COMPUTER.

 

Same. I have a 1537 built in January.

Tho I have XP installed, with the Dell Alps driver, when I try to horizontal scroll, the cursor swaps to the correct icon, but not working actually. I don't care too much about that because I seriously never used it (I rarely use the touchpad itself). I can live with it, only the damn sticky glitch would work.

 

Studio 1535 error codes...above taken from DCSE docs.

 

Interesting. I never get a cursor...it's just like that whole section of the touchpad does nothing at all. But it's not the touchpad, because if I disable the scroll regions, that area still works fine as a normal touchpad.

Also, what is "spiral scrolling"?

 

This has happened to me, after the laptop crashed during booting.. Wouldn't worry about it if the laptop seems fine.

 

I have no idea what it is used for, but if you move your finger in a circular motion you will see a spiral symbol appear on the screen.

 

Thank you for that! I had no idea the blinking actually meant something.

 

Yeah np...helps to know POST failure codes!

 

My first ever Studio 15 did the same blinking when it resumed from sleep. I found the issue to be related to the WiFi card. It was the Dell 1510 N card. There were some power settings you had to change to fix it. The newer Studio 15 I got about a month later never had the same problem (It also had the Dell 1510 N WiFi card.) My current Studio 1537 doesn't have the problem either, but it uses the Intel 5100abgn WiFi card.

Check your WiFi card and play around with the power settings. Stuff like "Wake Up capability" set it to "Magic Packet" or "Off" or something else.

 

In a circular motion where? On the scroll bar or just on the touchpad in general? How fast? That's never happened to me before, and I can't seem to make it happen...

Just to confirm, you're using the Alps touchpad driver from the Studio 1535 download page?

 

Its hard to get it working. Do you have it enabled in the scrolling settings? I believe it's called circular scrolling. I am also using the Alps driver. I start in the one of the bars then quickly move my finger in a circle motion. You want the horizontal or vertical scroll symbol to appear first. Kinda hard to explain, lol.

 

Well, this is interesting. The latest 1535 touchpad driver from Dell's page gives me none of those options. All I can do is enable or disable scrolling.

I just installed the Alps driver from the 1537, and the circular-scrolling and zoom features now show up. It really wouldn't kill Dell to have a little continuity between the same drivers on different notebook models.

 

I forgot to mention that I am using the Alps touchpad driver with the Dell Touchpad software. Is that what you were using?

No kidding, Dell needs to get their act together, lol.

 

Installing the driver automatically installs the Dell Touchpad software.

On that note, oh my god, circular scrolling is fantastic. I may never use a wheel mouse again.

 

Hahaha. I am glad someone found a use for it.