Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Well I returned the coreseair and purchased 16GB of the Kingston Value Ram KVR16S11/8.

The windows assessment again went from 7.8 with just the factory installed 8GB to 7.7 with this added 16GB.

The bios does say it is running at 1600 and CPU-Z shows:

DRAM Frequency is 798
CL is 11 Clocks


thanks,

Mike

 

Something is conflicting with Windows themes. When I switch back to Aero Standard I don't have the IE screen blackouts.

Can anyone identify what this is in the upper right corner of I.E.?

There's a faint four-square box, and when I click on it it brings up the menu headed by "Find Windows", "Display Splitter"?

 

Maybe it is the premier color utility. Do you have that insalled? I had issues with the utility. uninstalled and installe it a few times and now they seem gone. I also has to disable application color.

I think that square box is the premier color utility. I am not sure what it does.

Mike

 

Thanks. So even with legacy boot disabled, you can still use F12 to do a legacy boot?

Also, can secure boot be enabled and disabled at any time or once enabled, windows 8 will not boot without it being enabled.

I am going to give it a try today. I took out the screws for the swappable hard drive and it is now easy to put a different one in. I did not realize how easy.

I think I will also disable the secondary drive in the bios so when I go to install, it does not see that drive either. From what I read on here, SATA-1 is the secondary drive.

One last question, to get Win 8 upgrade to work, can I hook up my current drive with Win 8 to the eSata so it sees I have win 8 and then install on the primary drive? Do you think that will work?

thanks,

Mike

 

Yes, the F12 menu will allow you to boot legacy devices. (You can also use it to boot UEFI devices if you have the BIOS set to legacy boot. It always shows all choices.)

You can turn secure boot off after you turn it on. However, secure boot is not required for Windows 8 to boot up.

As for hooking up your drive to eSATA for the Windows 8 upgrade to find it, that might work, try it and see.

 

Thanks. I will give it a try. For the drivers, do I need to download all the various drives from the dell site or only items that windows does not recognize? I plan to also download the nVidia driver from nVidia.

 

For details on the driver situation with Windows 8, see my posts in the first two or three pages of this thread. Since the time I made the post, a lot of drivers have shown up on Windows Update so I'd say check there first and then install the drivers for devices that are still unrecognized. Also, the fingerprint reader driver just became available a few days ago. I personally prefer to only get from Dell the software that I really need. You'll need to install the drivers for the freefall sensor and fingerprint reader (if you have one) from Dell. I also installed the Dell feature enhancement pack because it adds some extra some power management options. I would also run the Intel chipset software INF installation utility. The one that Dell has available is the same as the latest version available from Intel's site. Otherwise I think everything you need should be included out of the box or on Windows Update.

 

Yeah, I don't have a clue as I'm upgrading from XP Professional on my prior workstations?

But "something" doesn't like it when I make theme adjustments & I.E. goes blackscreen.

Dell Pro Support lady was Googling for answers because there wasn't anything in their database.

Can I "turn off" PremierColor, or do you have to uninstall it???

 

Thanks. After I saw your post the other day on the fingerprint reader, I went ahead and saw they had a security update for Win 7 as well. It was a firmware update for control vault. I installed this firmware update this morning and then could not get back into windows. I would get the welcome screen, type my password, and then black screen with white cursor. After the update it did say it was successful and I had to restart the system.

I called dell and they said the firmware update to that should have nothing to do with windows. We ran tests and all passed.

I would up doing a system restore and am back into win 7. So not sure if i should have updated the driver first or note. I did not see anything stating such,.

Well soon I will be trying Win 8.

thanks

Mike

Edit: is this control vault firmware the fingerprint firmware or is that different?

 

My covet did not come with it installed. I installed it and unistalled it several times. I had an issue like you are having with excel. Made it unusable. I found turning off application colors stopped that. Apparently it kept switching from full color to RGB. I had no issue uninstalling the Premier color and re-installing several times. Also, Something happened this morning and I could not boot into windows (see post above). This was after upgrading the control vault firmware. Dell support says it probably had nothing to do with that. I did a system restore to 1/29 which was when I installed premier color. So right now I have no premier color running.

Mike