Terrible performance and no ability to "sleep" with 7 Ultimate

My Dell XPS M1330 is about a year and a half old, though still a pretty decent laptop. With Vista Ultimate, I got at least 5 hours of battery life, though since upgrading to Windows 7 Ultimate, I've only gotten up to two hours of battery life. I also am not able to put my laptop to sleep (in the start menu, "Sleep" is grayed out and in the power options, it only offers hibernation or nothing in the drop down menus). Also in the power options, it doesn't give me nearly as many options as Vista did. I am only able to select how long I want the screen to stay on - with Vista, I could choose when I want it to sleep and the initial brightness.

Is this common or why am I getting terrible performance? Also, is sleeping just not an option or...should it be for me?

Thanks a lot, I appreciate any help...Windows 7 has been a bit frustrating so far for me

 

I assume you've updated all your drivers by downloading them from Dell. Then you've downloaded the latest Windows Updates.

Next you need to see which drivers are preventing Windows from Sleeping. Using the Start menu search type "performance information." You should see a Control Panel applet called Performance Informations and Tools. Click that and there should be several critical messages. Lets see if we can't get this resolved.

 

try the MCE standby tool which works in vista 64 mode and has worked fine for me in win7 ultimate -- it will allow you to activate hibernate and sleep if you want. If sleep is missing its a Bios setting you have to change first: you can do this manually of course by MCE does this and co-ordinated the settings elsewhere on the machine.

 

drivers, you heard of it?

 

seems as though there is a noticeable problem here...it says there are missing drivers for the "Base System Device." I have a feeling this might be necessary haha



notice the obvious errors for the base system devices on the top, but also underneath, it says that the laptop needs troubleshooting. I tried the automatic fixes, but they failed. the extra information that link leads to is just a general help box, so that didn't do much...I already downloaded all the newest drivers from dell and ran windows update...neither of which fixed whatever drivers this is

thanks for your help by the way

 

oh you actually have a gpu driver.. the huge difference in battery life and performance seems really weird..

 

yeah...but I'm confused where to get them from if 1)dell doesn't offer them, 2)windows update doesn't offer them and 3)the automatic driver search/update in windows 7 doesn't find them either. and I'm not even sure what "Base System Device" is...therefore not sure where to attempt to find a driver.

 

Dell drivers for m1330


http://support.dell.com/support/dow...ystemID=XPS_M1330&os=WLH&osl=en&catid=&impid=

Base system device could mean anything. It could be a card reader, chipset, etc etc. Just see which ones are missing.

 

that website doesn't tell you which you have and which you don't currently...I already download and installed all of them that were "recommended" and not more than a year old...do I need to download the ones that are older than that too? what if I download this diagnostic and run that..?

http://support.dell.com/support/dow...d=-1&dateid=90&typeid=-1&formatid=-1&impid=-1

could that tell me what it is?

 

It is worth a try.

I remember Dell use to have a tool where you could punch in your support ticket and it would only list the drivers pertaining to your computer. Apparently that tool got laidoff.

 

Base System Devices are usualy your card readers for sd/mmc/etc... so unpack the drivers for your card reader and feed them to the specified device and it should install the right driver for it.