M2300 and vid card

Hi everyone,

I have a M2300 that I bought back in March or so. It has a [email protected], 4gb ram, 160gb hd (7200rpm) and a nvidia quadro FX360M (128m GDDR3).

Some weeks ago, and again yesterday, for some reason my touchpad ceased to work and the keyboard only accepted the keystrokes with some lag (ex. writing "name" would result in "nn" or "nm" or "am", and so on). I called dell support in Portugal and, while I was talking with them and searched for the service tag at the bottom of the laptop which required me to turn it up-side down, everything started working again. So, possibly a bad wire connection between the keyboard and the motherboard or something like that. They are sending a technician over to solve this problem tomorrow.

Anyway, one thing I've notived since I bought laptop is that the aero behaviour is a bit odd. Basically, maximizing, flip3d and stuff like that start in a buggy way (ie, not a smooth experience) and then, after some insistence (e.g. using flip3d several times) it starts working smoothly. Riva tuner shows that, at first setting the vid card clocks are at 180mhz (shaders and memory are around 300 something mhz, if not mistaken), but as I start using aero features more and more it clocks higher (290mhz and 420mhz for CPU core, if I'm not mistaken). I understand that this could be a feature to save energy and decrease heat, but it makes the user experience, far from nice. Sometimes, even with excel, selecting columns or rows is a pain as the experience is not fluid. I've tried several drivers and the behaviour is always the same.

I know that this chip may suffer from the dreaded nvidia problem, but I'm not sure if this behaviour is related to such problem. Although not a gamer vid card, it should deal with aero with no problem at all (hell, even the X3100 is capable of dealing with aero smoothly!), even at the lowest setting. I talked with the tech support and the guy offered me to change the motherboard (he had not heard of any similar case), but I don't want to start changing components just for the sake of it. Has anyone experienced something like this? Should I ask for a motherboard replacement? Also some artefacts like these, have appeared recently...

Best,

nickie

Edit: By the way the card is a bit better than GeForce 8400M GS, GeForce 9100M GS and Mobility Radeon HD3410, HD3430 and HD3450, according to notebookcheck. So any users with these vid cards can share their experience.