Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

This seems to have been pulled, I don't see it at the link or checking BIOS options on the product support page - A10 is the latest at the moment?

 

Sure enough, it's missing. I still have the .EXE file but I haven't installed yet. Wondering if I should wait now....

 

If it's been pulled, I would wait. I haven't seen any issues with mine on A11, but there might be some edge case, so better be safe than sorry.

 

Anyone install windows 8.1? I did but restored to a backup I made. Mainly becuase my cisco vpn would not work and I did not have time to figure it out (I should not have installed the 8.1). Also, I noticed it changed the default login. so instead of just my old login of my name and then my password, i had to sign in using my MS id. Anyway to go back to just username and pw instead of the MS ID or is this now a change for the better .

 

Not on my M6700, 8.1 is going to wait until I know it's stable on the M6700 and on my other notebooks which are running 8.1. I can't have Windows going wonky on me on my M6700.

 

I haven't upgraded my main install but I have done a test install to check drivers, and I have been playing with it in VMware as well. I know that Windows 8.1 insists much more heavily that you use a Microsoft account instead of a local account. The only way I think you can get around it is kill your Internet access during the setup process where it asks for your Microsoft account... eventually it will give up and let you use a local account.

I've been making a list of things I need to be sure are supported in Windows 8.1 and everything has been addressed except the NVIDIA display driver. (Yeah, a Windows 8 driver will probably work fine but I'm going to wait until they release a non-beta WDDM 1.3 driver.) It looks like all other hardware drivers have been updated. I've verified that the fingerprint reader works with the M6800 driver, the freefall sensor and touchpad have recently been updated on the M6700 driver page, and everything else is supported by Windows out-of-the-box.

If you use any software that operates at a "system level" (VMware, VPN client, antivirus, disk tools, anything that installs virtual device drivers, etc.), check for official Windows 8.1 support before upgrading. Not expecting higher-level apps to have issues. Besides the drivers, my other main concern was VMware Workstation, but it was updated promptly (though I had to pay for it, blah).

Naturally, do a full system backup first! (Looks like you had this covered.)

Once an NVIDIA update is posted, I'll sit on it for a week to make sure it seems stable, and then do a full backup and upgrade to 8.1....

 

With regards to the touchpad driver update posted for Windows 8.1 (version 8.1200.101.134).

I tried it today and had to revert to the previous version (8.1200.101.127). The new one stopped working with two-finger scroll after a while, wouldn't come back unless I rebooted.

 

Alright, so I found myself with some extra time yesterday. My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to do a system image and then try the Windows 8.1 upgrade.

After starting the update process from the Windows Store, after a few reboots I got a BSOD. Windows cleaned itself up and then I got this message:



Apparently this is not an isolated issue, and while the solution remains ambiguous, several people have reported success after updating their NVIDIA drivers. Maybe sitting around and waiting for the Windows 8.1 drivers was the appropriate thing to do.

Anyway, not knowing when to stop, I downloaded the Windows 8.1 ISO from TechNet and ran the upgrade using that. It was successful, I got to the desktop on Windows 8.1, but it started BSODing after the first reboot (I didn't do anything other than check Microsoft Update)... I ended up having to restore my system image and I'm back on Windows 8 yet again.

Will try again once the NVIDIA drivers are actually ready and see if that solves the problem.

 

Sorry to hear about your experience. My own upgrades on other machines haven't been exactly smooth. There's a particular atom display driver crashing on wake up issue that is yet unresolved and I had to do a clean install of Windows 8 to get 8.1 to install on my Elitebook 2760p because the updater didn't like the 100 MB system reserved partition.

Windows 8.1 is much nicer though and finally I can have 4 rows of tiles on an atom/1366x768 device. Finally! The calendar app's new defaults are annoying the crap out of me too, but that's the only minor complaint I have so far about the OS itself.

Lack of driver support form certain laptop OEMs as well as device manufacturers is annoying the heck out of me though. In case you were wondering, I am looking at you HP and Intel.

 

Using a M6700 with IPS. I stupidly turned on SecureBoot/Disabled Legacy ROM in the BIOS.

Of course what should easily fix it is resetting the BIOS, but that it seeming to be extremely problematic/not working.

I followed the steps one user posted here:
Dell Precision M4700 (Windows 7 pro) won't boot after configured with UEFI and Secure Boot - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

Doesn't seem to work. Is there a special trick with the M6700? It does the whole "two quick boots by itself" then the standard boot, but the screen still stays blank. There doesn't seem to be any hardware issues; worked perfectly fine before the mistake and there are zero boot light error notifications.