M4800 Owner's Thread

If I may ask, what Intel HD driver version do you use? (I was thinking… If the sound had anything to do with GPU switching, the Intel driver might be a cofactor.)

 

I'm running the latest ones from the intel website right now, and it helped some of my issues with hand-offs from the integrated to the dedicated GPU's.

 

My current take on the Nvidia board’s ‘snapping’ sound:

It seems to be simply the graphic board’s switching itself on. I guess that with a very old driver (327.62 in my case), the board was never fully switched off, even when not used by anything.

If one should find the sound annoying, one work-around seems to be to keep something in the background that will keep the board active.
In Windows 8.1, that something can easily be some stupid suspended (ie. run and then closed) metro app like Time.exe (the Alarms app), which—for whatever reason—elects to activate the GPU. So long as Nvidia’s GPU-activity system-tray indicator shows something active, there should be no snapping sound.

Perhaps a solution more meaningful in the long run would be to manually set all those random apps that activate the dGPU without obvious need for it to use the iGPU instead.

 

I’m also irrepressibly curious to ask whether anyone of you with Optimus has not been offered the latest Intel HD drivers (3907) as optional update in Windows Update.

 

Snapping sounds aren't a good thing. I actually checked my K2100M for loose chokes/coils when I was replacing my K1100M. A dab of super glue in the coils will prevent buzzing/whining sometimes, but snapping sounds are new to me.

 

Something weird happened.

I was about to leave with the M4800. I hestitated a little bit between shutting it down completely or putting it in standby. I pressed stand-by and shut the lid, then took off the charger. I then had forgotten to look something up. I opened it back up again.. And it was completely off. Luckily I didn't have anything of importance open. It booted right up as if nothing happened (not concidering the "windows didn't shut down properly" as extraordinary). I closed the lid again, went away, did some work, and when I got back I plugged it in, only to find an orange disco light where the white battery charging indicator should be lighting up. Windows told me that I had 72% remaining and that it was not charging. Rebooted it, went into the BIOS and it told me that there was a "communication error" in the battery. I shut it off, reconnected the adapter and all was well... Hopefully this isn't going to be common. :/

 

I’m pretty sure it happened to me once that I put the computer to sleep—and when I woke it up, it just booted. I don’t remember whether I disconnected AC power while the computer was in sleep. Quite likely not. The case really frightened me. It happened sometime in the early days of my M4800 ownership; I was then very much on guard for further instances but it has never happened again. I’m quite sure I’ve done at least one BIOS upgrade since.

This may be unrelated but there appears an “unexpected shutdown” every while in my Windows logs. These errors seem to be completely bogus. When I tried to figure them out, I found some of them logged with times when I was just working on the computer and did not put it to sleep, or sometimes I did but then it woke up OK.

BTW, I hit the sleep button quite a few times every day and do it with confidence—except for documents open from the cloud which typically don’t like it.

 

Got a Dell M4800 with an ePort plus docking station. Whenever I try to undock the machine, the screen does not come back on (its connected to a dell monitor when docked). When I try to click "Undock" from the start menu I get the message "You cannot eject your computer because one of the devices in the docking station 'wPCI Down stream port (marlon)', device is not removable and cannot be ejected or unplugged."

I think the marlon driver is a code reference to my WiGig adapter. Does anyone know how I can fix this issue?

 

Just a quick check: What’s your graphics card and what driver version do you use?

 

Wohow! There’s a new BIOS A10, and let’s guess what’s among the fixes:
Fixed system fails to resume from sleep when network controller is disabled.

Any first adopters? Any first musings about this version?

EDIT:
[h=3]Fixes & Enhancements[/h] Fixes:
-Fixed UEFI BIOS vulnerability.
-Fixed Ethernet device is not shown under UEFI Shell.
-Fixed large external USB3.0 device connected could make system fail to boot in UEFI mode.
-Fixed system fails to resume from sleep when network controller is disabled.
-Set Intel Chipset feature "Daylight Savings" disabled, let "Daylight Savings" be handled by Operating System.

Enhancements:
-Reduced boot time to PXE.
-Updated Intel CPU microcode.
-Updated Intel Graphics VBIOS to 2178v15.
-Updated Intel GOP to 5.0.1037v16.
-Supported Embedded DisplayPort panel.