Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

@Rukes

Which graphics card do you have? And when did you purchase your M6700?

NVIDIA cards with an older version of the video BIOS will have this issue if you disable legacy option ROMs. If you have the K5000M I can send you the updated vBIOS image.

For the K5000M, the old BIOS version is 80.04.33.00.35 and the updated one is 80.04.5A.00.05. You can check the version number of your card's BIOS using GPU-Z.

 

PHP:

Yes I have the K5000M bought on launch August 2012.

Only problem is: how do I even update the BIOS of the card if I can't get the screen to turn on?

 

Ah, a problem. In my case, I reset the BIOS by pulling the mini cell battery under the main cover of the bottom of the laptop. Since I don't have the IPS screen, this defaulted Optimus to enabled and the laptop powered on using the integrated Intel GPU.

However, with the IPS display you can't enable Optimus. I don't remember what the default state is for secure boot being enabled if you reset the BIOS, seems odd that they would default it to enabled, but newer BIOS revisions may have it on by default? Anyway, I'd suggest pulling the mini cell battery first if you haven't tried that already.

Another thing that might help. In my case I was able to get an external display up and running even though the built-in display did not work. If you have Windows 8, you might notice that when you boot up the machine with an external display, it appears to be working (green light) but the display is blank. Remember that the lock screen only appears on the primary display and other machines show black until you get to the desktop. You can still move the mouse across the displays while the machine is locked, but you'll have to enter your password blind. If you can get to the desktop it should be possible to switch another display to primary with some fiddling.

If your machine boots to the lock screen but your external display isn't showing anything, try disconnecting/reconnecting it while the machine is up.

After getting up and running in this configuration, I realized that I could also get the internal display up and running. There was a third display that Windows wanted to use as the primary, no idea why it's there as it was not connected to anything and naturally didn't display anything, but I think it's also why you can't see anything pre-boot.

Here's the updated video BIOS and the nvflash tool needed to apply it. It's a command-line tool, be sure to start your command prompt "as administrator".
http://stuff.aaron-kelley.net/2013/10/k5000m-5a0005.zip

Note, if you get nervous, or you can't make progress with this information, you can contact Dell for support; you should still be under warranty with plenty of room to spare.

I'm rather surprised that Dell didn't provide a notice or an update about this, as it's easy to find yourself in this position if you have a pre-Windows 8 machine with NVIDIA GPU.

 

Hi, newbie here...I have managed to crack the gorilla glass screen on my M6700 covet edition. Just closed the laptop, put it in my laptop bag, went to work and opened it...

has anyone else had this problem?

Dell are suggesting that although it is only the glass cover that is cracked, i have to replace the entire screen (quoted $Au 1500 plus labour...?!?) - this seems a very stupid design flaw to me.

The crack appears to have come from a weak point at the edge of the cut around to one of the screen clips.

Am keen to hear if anyone else has come across this issue?

Thanks!

 

I have had something similar happen before and removing the mini battery worked fine then, so it could be something with the newer BIOS.

Most likely it's booting at BIOS defaults with UEFI disabled and then not being able to detect the Windows 8 drive. All a literally blind guess, but there has got to be a way to reset everything...

 

Ouch! That's a bummer. As a new owner of a Covet -- although I haven't yet actually taken possession of it -- this is cause for concern about the touted "edge to edge" gorilla glass screen.

 

So a bit of an update, still can't get the laptop to display on the screen Holding D for LCD diagonostics shows the panel is working just fine at least.

Dell support thinks it could be the motherboard; I also mentioned the updated Nvidia K5000M so they are going to look into bringing over and installing replacements for both Wednesday or Thursday. Worse comes to worse if they can't bring a videocard replacement and the mobo is the problem I can update the bios now, thankfully!

Still would love to see if I could figure out how to get my laptop to boot though, to avoid tech support from coming by!

 

I updated my K3000M IPS machine a few days ago. Mostly the experience was painless and all seems OK, but there were a couple of hiccups to overcome....

1. I don't bother with Premier Color as I am happy to use my panel in sRGB mode, which should be the default, and don't wish to install/run extra bloat if it's not needed. However, the 8.1 update gave me a full gamut display, which made a right mess of things. That was easily fixed by installing the latest nVidia drivers.

2. I also ran into the problem with secure boot and no legacy support blanking my display. That was resolved (as always) by pulling the BIOS battery lead and resetting the BIOS. BTW, I'm now on BIOS A11, which appeared briefly, and it seems fine. If a video BIOS update could resolve the blank display I'd love to give it a go, but I can't find an update anywhere for the K3000M. Any ideas?

3. I only use IE for access to my banking site, for which IE is required, but the site is not fully compatible with IE11, even when switching to compatibility mode. I guess that's more a problem with the bank's code than IE, but it's a heads up for people who rely on IE over a wide range of sites.

4. I have noticed my WiFi connection dropping out a few times, which never used to happen on 8.0, but it is rare (maybe four times over the past few days) and easily rectified if it happens.

I've also updated another laptop - Twinhead Clone about five years old - and a Dell XPS 420 PC of similar vintage. The Twinhead has also experienced occasional WiFi dropouts, but no other problems.

All in all I'm quite happy to stick with 8.1. I do wish that Dell would get their act together with the BIOS settings and the IPS panel. It's a shambles as things stand. The drivers and downloads site is also a right mess when it comes to my machine. If I use my own service tag I am offered very few drivers for Windows 8 and need to search for generic M6700 drivers on the Dell site in order to find most things I might require

 

Dell now has separate Windows 8.1 sections on the driver page. Here, they posted new NVIDIA drivers, 326.80. (325 and up explicitly support Windows 8.1.) Also, BIOS A11 is back.

Will give it a try and see if the upgrade works any better.....

[Edit]
326.80 also BSODs at boot. Same error that I got from the 327.23 driver on NVIDIA's site, and same error that I get when trying to upgrade to Windows 8.1. Kept a minidump this time which I will dig into soon.

[Edit 2]
Minidump analysis indicates that it's definitely an NVIDIA issue, with nvkflt.sys (SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED). Not much else information, though. I'll try a clean driver uninstall/reinstall later and see if that makes any difference.

 

I'm running the latest Windows 8.0 Quadro ODE drivers direct from the nVidia site. No BSOD. I only have the basic drivers installed - no 3D, nView, WIM - using the clean install option.

320.92-quadro-notebook-win8-win7-64bit-international-whql.exe